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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in computing | 6/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:17:23.795787+00:00 | kb-cron |
Gwen Bell developed the Computer Museum in 1980. The museum, which collected computer artifacts became a non-profit organization in 1982 and in 1984, Bell moved it to downtown Boston. Adele Goldberg served as president of ACM between 1984 and 1986. In 1981, Deborah Washington Brown became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University (at the time the degree was part of the applied mathematics program). Her thesis was titled "The solution of difference equations describing array manipulation in program loops". Shortly after, in 1982, Marsha R. Williams became the second African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. Sometimes known as the "Betsy Ross of the personal computer," according to the New York Times, Susan Kare worked with Steve Jobs to design the original icons for the Macintosh. Kare designed the moving watch, paintbrush and trash can elements that made using a Mac user-friendly. Kare worked for Apple until the mid-1980s, going on to work on icons for Windows 3.0. Other types of computer graphics were being developed by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann in Canada. Thalmann started working on computer animation to develop "realistic virtual actors" first at the University of Montréal in 1980 and later in 1988 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Computer and video games became popular in the 1980s, but many were primarily action-oriented and not designed from a woman's point of view. Stereotypical characters such as the damsel in distress featured prominently and consequently were not inviting towards women. Dona Bailey designed Centipede, where the player shoots insects, as a reaction to such games, later saying "It didn't seem bad to shoot a bug". Carol Shaw, considered to be the first modern female games designer, released a 3D version of tic-tac-toe for the Atari 2600 in 1980. Roberta Williams and her husband Ken, founded Sierra Online and pioneered the graphic adventure game format in Mystery House and the King's Quest series. The games had a friendly graphical user interface and introduced humor and puzzles. Cited as an important game designer, her influence spread from Sierra to other companies such as LucasArts and beyond. Brenda Laurel ported games from arcade versions to the Atari 8-bit computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She then went to work for Activision and later wrote the manual for Maniac Mansion. 1984 was the year of Women into Science and Engineering (WISE Campaign). A 1984 report by Ebury Publishing reported that in a typical family, only 5% of mothers and 19% of daughters were using a computer at home, compared to 25% of fathers and 51% of sons. To counteract this, the company launched a series of software titles designed towards women and publicized in Good Housekeeping. Anita Borg, who had been noticing that women were under-represented in computer science, founded an email support group, Systers, in 1987. As Ethernet became the standard for networking computers locally, Radia Perlman, who worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was asked to "fix" limitations that Ethernet imposed on large network traffic. In 1985, Perlman came up with a way to route information packets from one computer to another in an "infinitely scalable" way that allowed large networks like the Internet to function. Her solution took less than a few days to design and write up. The name of the algorithm she created is the Spanning Tree Protocol. In 1986, Lixia Zhang was the only woman and graduate student to participate in the early Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings. Zhang was involved in early Internet development. In Europe, project was developed in the mid-1980s to create an academic network in Europe using the Open System Interconnection (OSI) standards. Borka Jerman Blažič, a Yugoslavian computer scientist was invited to work on the project. She was involved in establishing a Yugoslav Research and Academic Network (YUNAC) in 1989 and registered the domain of .yu for the country. In the field of human–computer interaction (HCI), French computer scientist, Joëlle Coutaz developed the presentation-abstraction-control (PAC) model in 1987. She founded the User Interface group at the Laboratorire de Génie Informatique of IMAG where they worked on different problems relating to user interface and other software tools. In 1988, Stacy Horn, who had been introduced to bulletin board systems (BBS) through The WELL, decided to create her own online community in New York, which she called the East Coast Hang Out (ECHO). Horn invested her own money and pitched the idea for ECHO to others after bankers refused to hear her business plan. Horn built her BBS using UNIX, which she and her friends taught to one another. Eventually ECHO moved an office in Tribeca in the early 1990s and started getting press attention. ECHO's users could post about topics that interested them, and chat with one another, and were provided email accounts. Around half of ECHO's users were women. ECHO was still online as of 2018.
=== 1990s ===