Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

 Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, Claire L Evans, Portfolio/Penguin, 2018

The history of computers has always thought to be full of men doing amazing things. This book shows that plenty of women were involved, from the beginning.

Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper make appearances in this book, along with the "ENIAC Six." They were six women who did the actual "programming" of ENIAC, housed at the University of Pennsylvania, in the mid-1940s. It involved actually moving, and reconnecting, sections of the room-sized computer for each new computation. During the war, a computer was a woman who sat at a table and computed ballistics trajectories by hand. There was no ENIAC manual to consult, so they got very good at knowing how it worked. They also got none of the public credit. After the war, the women, plus Hopper, moved to the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, the world's first big computer company. After a few years of being very busy, financial problems forced the company to sell itself to another company. Remington-Rand made business machines and didn't know what to do with computers (or these free-thinking women). Things did not end well for the women.

In 1980s New York City, Stacy Horn loved connecting to the WELL, the famous West Coast BBS (bulletin board system). But the long-distance phone bills were getting out of hand. So she started ECHO, one of the first social networks, out of her apartment. 

Girls like playing computer games just as much as boys (perhaps with less emphasis on death and explosions). Some game manufacturers noticed, and tried to take advantage of this untapped market.

This is an excellent book. It expertly punches holes in the all-male mythology of Silicon Valley. For anyone interested in how the future is really made, start here.