Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
The analytical engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
Anita Borg was an American computer scientist celebrated for advocating for women’s representation and professional advancement in technology. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
The Lovelace Medal was established by the British Computer Society in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awardees deliver the Lovelace Lecture.
Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements. Since the 18th century, women have developed scientific computations, including Nicole-Reine Lepaute's prediction of Halley's Comet, and Maria Mitchell's computation of the motion of Venus.
Jean E. Sammet was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language.
Frances Elizabeth Holberton was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage.
Jean Bartik was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita.
Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
Elaine Jessica Weyuker is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and an AT&T Fellow at Bell Labs for research in software metrics and testing as well as elected to the National Academy of Engineering. She is the author of over 130 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings.
Mary Allen Wilkes is a lawyer, former computer programmer and logic designer, known for her work with the LINC computer, now recognized by many as the world's first "personal computer".
Margaret Elaine Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
AnitaB.org is a global nonprofit organization based in Belmont, California. Founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, the institute's primary aim is to recruit, retain, and advance women in technology.
Anita Katherine Jones is an American computer scientist and former U.S. government official. She was Director, Defense Research and Engineering from 1993 to 1997.
This is a timeline of women in computing. It covers the time when women worked as "human computers" and then as programmers of physical computers. Eventually, women programmers went on to write software, develop Internet technologies and other types of programming. Women have also been involved in computer science, various related types of engineering and computer hardware.
Adele Mildred Koss, known as Milly Koss, was an American pioneering computer programmer. The Association for Women in Computing awarded her an Ada Lovelace Award in 2000.
Velma Elizabeth Huskey was a pioneer in early computing and author of several important papers on the history of computing.
