Last week we got several reminders of the significant roles played by women in what is often perceived these days as a rather male-dominated and even somewhat macho field.<\/p>\n
On Dec 6 Maria Popover’s\u00a0Brain Pickings<\/a>\u00a0site\u00a0pointed to a tribute video<\/a>\u00a0 about holocaust survivor and 1960’s software entrepreneur ‘Steve’ Shirley<\/a> (produced by Google about 3 months ago as part of their ‘computing heritage’ series). Then on Dec 9 \u00a0the Google Doodle<\/a> was in honour of the birthday of Grace Hopper<\/a>\u00a0 who created the first compiled computer language in the 1950’s, developed COBOL, and coined the term “debugging”. And it may have been that which prompted the Christian Science Monitor to do a piece on a number of important female pioneers of computing \u00a0– going all the way back to\u00a0Ada Lovelace<\/a>\u00a0who worked with Charles Babbage on the idea of programmable computers long before electronic versions were available (and whose birthday just happens to have been the very next day – but no doodle for her this year as she already got that honour last year<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week we got several reminders of the significant roles played by women in what is often perceived these days as a rather male-dominated and even somewhat macho field. On Dec 6 Maria Popover’s\u00a0Brain Pickings\u00a0site\u00a0pointed to a tribute video\u00a0 about … Continue reading