Claire L. Evans

This is a very interesting account of the women who were influential in shaping computing and the internet as we know them today. There are many unsung heroines in the history of computing, and it's good to see someone tell their stories. As a woman who works in technology today, I had a lot of bittersweet "what if" moments - what if a group of men hadn't gotten together and decided that programming should be called "engineering"? What if the women who programmed ENIAC had gotten the full show more credit they deserved - would the field have been more friendly for women? What if Mattel hadn't bought up all the video games that were being marketed to girls and shut them down?

Evans does walk a fine line around issues of women's innate abilities. She often hints that women are innately better at things like communicating and networking. The chapter about games for video games is especially egregious here. She does not address the fact that there is no way of knowing whether women are innately better at these things: women are socialized to be better at them. The idea that one gender is better than another at anything is really dangerous in this context.

Aside from that, this is an engaging book and tells some really important stories. show less

This approachable account does just what it set outs to do: provide an account of the internet's development through the stories of women who played pivotal roles. I'd encountered some of these women before (Ada Lovelace seems to be having a moment), but others I hadn't. While some of the women featured may be unknown, the story should be familiar to those who read about the history of technology. The book and the information are good, but I will admit I enjoyed Walter Issacson's The show more Innovators more, which is a more comprehensive history of computers. show less

Terraform is Vice Media's speculative fiction arm, and these stories are internet age provocations, short, sharp, often intriguing. Divided into three sections, Watch on the panopticon, World with classic scifi alternative worlds, and Burn focusing on disaster, there are a lot of winners in this collection, and surprisingly little dross. My only overall thought is that with the stories coming in at around 7 pages (about 2.5 kilowords, if my memory is correct), at lot of these stories feel show more like the first acts of something bigger, trading a conclusion for a punchline. But on the other hand, I read them all, and any short fiction collection has at least one story that just doesn't vibe.

Some that stuck with me:
Busy - Omar El Akkad. The dystopia of make-work in a world where human labor is unnecessary, but dignity is still required.
Flyover Country - Tim Maughan. Maughan imagines an American maquiladora under a fascist regime, and the small risks that people will take for one moment of human contact.
Warning Signs - Emily L. Smith. A clever deconstruction of a vile main character in the age of #MeToo, app-enabled dating, and female-gendered AI assistants.
The Prostitute - Max Wynn. A new kind of tricking, with telepresence operated humans, and a very unusual client.
The Duchy of Toe Adam - Lincoln Michel. Dog-eared space opera with a punchline that lands!
An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried - Debbie Urbanski. Climate fiction in the vein of J.G. Ballard on at his best. show less

Claire L. Evans takes us through a brisk tour of of women's contributions to computer science and the World Wide Web/Internet. She starts with Ada Lovelace and female computers (if you've seen Hidden Figures then you get it), going on to Grace Hopper and other awesome ladies programming and debugging computers etc. Then she goes on through the decades to talk about other awesome tech women, none of whom I had heard about. An English woman came up with working hypertext like a decade before show more Tim Berners-Lee did, but she used a different format of internet. It's all such fascinating stuff.

Evans covers all of this in an engaging way, neither too scientific nor casual/chatty. As a journalist, Evans (who interviewed just about all of these women personally) is great at telling the stories. My quibbles: there are hardly any pictures of the women featured/interviewed, and I'd have loved a recommended reading list as well. There are endnotes, but no little numbers in the body of the text to indicate which citation or quotation goes to which endnote, which I personally think is irresponsible in a nonfiction book. Regardless, I really enjoyed this book and want to learn more about the awesome band of broads who gave us the internet/WWW. Thanks for everything, ladies.

Read this book's non-condensed review and trigger warnings at https://fileundermichellaneous.blogspot.com/2022/03/book-review-broad-band-untol... show less