IndexAbstractIntroductionNineteenth century (before 1900)The advance during the world wars (1900 - 1950)The birth of programming languages ​​(1950 - 1970)ConclusionReferencesAbstractWomen have always played a important role in the discoveries of computing, but its history has always been written by men. Nowadays, men outnumber women by 3 times in all IT occupations in the United States, but women continue to prove essential in the development of the technological field. This work intends to write this story through the achievements and contributions of several notable women throughout history, from the first human computers to modern computers. The main goal is to highlight the importance of their discoveries and the impact they have had on the field, which has been obscured throughout history. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay IntroductionThe etymology of the word computer comes from the Latin putare meaning to think and prune. Its first known use dates back to 1613 (Stevenson 2010) in a book entitled The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Braithwait: “I haue (sic) read the most true computer of Times, and the best Arithmetician that ever (sic) breathed , and he makes your days short.” The use of the word initially referred to a human being, a person who performed calculations or calculations, but became popular during World War II, when it was used by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA) to describe the group of female mathematicians who worked on calculations, relieving engineers of this essential and exhaustive work (Grier 2013). However, women's role in computing begins long before World War II (Margolis and Fisher 2003). In the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be tested on a computer that existed only on paper. But over the years, women and their main contribution in this field have been slowly decreasing, and the big gender gap appeared only in the 1980s. At this point, concern and research following the gender gap grew (Brecher 1985, Frenkel 1990), attracting community attention. However, the number of women in the area continues to decline each year, attracting research seeking to explain this phenomenon (Cohoon and Aspray 2006). Furthermore, a large number of projects and groups have been created in an attempt to reverse this problem and encourage women to apply for IT-related fields (Gürer and Camp 2002). Keeping this issue in mind, this work aims to emphasize the place of women in computing. history (Tatnall 2010), telling it through women's eyes, not only showing specific moments and momentary breakthroughs, but placing women in their actual roles throughout history, as equal participants in the development of computers when permitted. We will start in 1822 with Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and the analytical engine, going through all the major discoveries and developments that led us to the computer we know today focusing on female achievements. In addition to Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014), Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015) and Margaret Hamilton (Piazza 2018), we will also talk about some little-known but equally important women, such as Mavis Batey, Elizabeth Webb Wilson and Beatrice Worsley. , the main goal of this work is to place women at the forefront of the history of computing, even though in the United States the number of men outnumbers women by 3 times in all computing occupations (Ashcraft, McLain and Eger 2016). We want to show how their job is notwas only timely, but essential to the development of current technologies, also making clear the impact they have in a traditionally male scientific field. 19th century (before 1900) Although the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a programmable loom in 1801 that used perforated wooden cards, similar to those used years later by the first computers (Delve 2007), the beginning of the computer's history is always attributed to the English polymath Charles Babbage. He is considered "the father of the computer". Babbage created the first mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. It was first described in 1837 and, although considered Babbage's greatest achievement, he never saw it completed (Bromley 1982). The analytical machine had a structure similar to modern computers: an arithmetic logic unit, control flow with branching and conditional loops, and integrated memory. Henry Prevost Babbage, the son of Charles Babbage, continued his father's work, but was unable to finish the construction. Only in 1991, the Science Museum in London built a complete, working version of the machine, called the Difference Engine No 2 (Markoff 2011). While working on his inventions, Babbage corresponded with Ada Lovelace (Essinger 2014). Ada was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron but she and her mother were abandoned by him when she was only a month old. Amara, her mother, who had studied mathematics herself, raised Ada by motivating her interest in mathematics and logic in an attempt to prevent her from becoming a poet like her father (Moore 1977). Her correspondence with Babbage began when she was still a teenager and allowed her to develop an algorithm for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers on the analytical engine (Hammerman and Russell 2015). For this creation she is considered the first computer programmer, although programming languages ​​had not yet been invented (Fuegi and Francis 2003). The late 19th century saw the construction of a punched card system used to calculate the 1880 census. Herman Hollerith, its inventor, founded the Tabifying Machine Company which later became IBM (Campbell-Kelly 2018). At the same time, Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined one of Harvard's first “computers,” groups of human calculators, usually composed of women, as women were not allowed to use telescopes at that time (Vishveshwara 2015). He performed calculations on measuring and cataloging the brightness of stars, discovering variable Cepheids, a type of star, which led to evidence of the expansion of the universe (Johnson 2005). The advance during the world wars (1900 - 1950) The beginning of the 20th century was marked by great wars. These events led to great progress in several scientific fields, including computer science. It also gave space for women to participate in the process, as many men fought on the battlefield. Women were first called upon during World War I to do ballistic calculations as human computers. Although Elizabeth Webb Wilson did not take part in the suffrage movement, her actions reassured him. She had a surprising talent for mathematics and turned down nine jobs in Washington until they offered her a computer chief position, which she said would fit her mathematical talents (Grier 2013). At the same time, in the UK, Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave works as a human computer for the Ministry of Munitions, carrying out research for the government on aeronautical mathematics (Jones 2009). Even after the war ended in 1930, NASA continued to hire women to work in its computer fleet analyzing data from wind tunnels and flight tests (Atkinson 2015). While during World War II, Alan Turing developed the main onesconcepts of a universal machine system that would be the basis for most ideas for modern computers, several American women were recruited to operate early computing machines such as the WREN Colossus at Bletchley Park (Copeland 2010) and later the ENIAC computers and MANIAC I (Pearson Frehill and McNeely 2015). Alan Turing is also known for cracking the Enigma code, a German naval cipher machine, which helped end the war. What is usually forgotten is that Mavis Batey also managed to crack an Enigma machine, that of the Italian Navy, at the age of just 19, together with Dilly Knox. She worked at Bletchley Park and is considered one of the keys to the success of D-Day, relaying important messages from the Germans and Italians. In addition to the Italian Enigma naval machine, he also cracked the Abwehr Enigma and the BFG (Batey 2017). During the same war, actress Hedy Lamarr, together with George Antheil, developed a radio guidance system that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology. Although they have never been used by the US Navy, the principles of their work are embodied in Bluetooth and WiFi technologies. He had no training in the format and did not fit the Hollywood style. He spent his free time inventing rather than partying or drinking. His invention was taken for granted and was only recognized in the 1990s, when he was in his early 80s (Rodi 2012). As for companies, in 1939, David Packard and Bill Hewlett founded theirs in a Palo Alto garage, while a few years later, Ruth Leach Amonette was elected vice president of IBM, a company more than 30 years old. She was the first woman to hold that role. At the end of the wars, women were able to maintain their roles as part of the computing development of the time. Dorothy Vaughan, who left her teaching job to join the Langley Research Center as a human computer. In 1948, she was promoted and became the first black supervisor at NACA in 1948. She later specialized in self-taught FORTRAN computer programming and taught other women programming languages ​​to open up more opportunities for them. She raised six children while working at NACA and encouraged other women to grow their careers (Allen 2017). At the same time Gertrude Blanch led the Mathematical Tables Project group from 1938 to 1948, a computing organization that was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). After the project closed with the end of the war, he directed the IT office of the Institute for Numerical Analysis at UCLA (Grier 1997). The late 1940s saw one of the greatest advances in computer history: William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain of Bell Laboratories invented the transistor, a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch the electronic signals that make up the building block of modern computers (Brinkman, Haggan, and Troutman 1997). Meanwhile, Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy officer, programmed the Harvard Mark I, a large electromechanical computer 51 feet long and 8 feet high, using more than 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wiring (Williams 1999). She developed the first compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0, and was one of the creators of the COBOL programming language. She is also credited with popularizing the term debugging after finding a moth on a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer that was causing errors in her programs (Beyer 2015). At the same time, Irma Wyman was working on a rocket guidance project at Harvard University. Willow Run Research Center when he visited the US Naval Proving Ground, meeting Grace Hopper. Their meeting changedIrma's life, stating that it made her enthusiastic about new technologies and guided her career (Gilbert and Moore 2012). She later joined Honeywell, an American multinational, and eventually became Honeywell's first female CIO. She, just like most women in this field, loved passing on her knowledge to young women in computer science, even funding a scholarship at the University of Michigan Women's Education Center, her alma mater ( Bjorhus 2015). By the 1950s, women had played a notable role in the development of computing around the world: Canadian scientist Beatrice Worsley had run the first program on the EDSAC computer in 1949 (Campbell 2003); Edith Clarke, an American electrical engineer, had filed patents for a graphing calculator and became the first female professor of electrical engineering in the United States in 1947 (Layne 2009); German mathematician Grete Hermann had published her seminal paper on computer algebra in 1926, and her critique of John von Neumann's proof of the hidden variable theorem in 1935, the latter ignored by the physics community for more than 30 years. slowing down the development of quantum mechanics (Herzenberg 2008); and Austrian mathematician Johanna Piesch published two pioneering papers on Boolean algebra, one of the foundations of digital computation (Zemanek 1993). The birth of programming languages ​​(1950 - 1970) An important point of development for computer science was the creation of programming languages. By using a notation closer to human language than the machine language originally used, he made programming more accessible and began to popularize computing. COBOL is considered the first programming language and was developed by Grace Hopper in 1953 (Bemer 1971). At the same time, a team of IBM programmers led by John W. Backus created another programming language, FORTRAN, focused on numerical computation and engineering applications (Backus 1978). In the early 1950s, Ida Rhodes, who had worked with Gertrude Blanch on the Mathematical Tables Project in 1940 (Blanch and Rhodes 1974), together with Betty Holberton, also designed a programming language. The C-10 language was used on the UNIVAC I computer and is considered the prototype of modern programming languages. Betty Holberton also participated in the early development of the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages ​​together with Grace Hopper (Beyer 2015). She is known for being one of six women to program the ENIAC along with Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas during World War II. They were classified as “subprofessionals” and electronically performed calculations for ballistic trajectories with a great impact on computing (Fritz 1996). Later in 1962, Jean E. Sammet, who also has contacts with Grace Hopper and the UNIVAC I team, not only developed a new language, the FORMAC programming language, but also studied the history of programming languages until today. She later became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery (Bergin 2009). The mid-1960s marked the first step towards the popularization of modern computers, Douglas Engelbart developed a machine with a mouse and a graphical user interface (English, Engelbart and Berman 1967). At the same time, women struggled to maintain their opportunities in the IT field. While Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Gürer 1995), Dame Stephanie Shirley advocated for women's involvement in computing. He founded a software company and employed more women than men,having only 1% male programmers, until this became illegal in 1975 (Shirley and Askwith 2017). She also adopted the name “Steve” to survive in a male-dominated world and programmed the Concorde's black box flight recorder (Tickle 2017). Like Shirley, multiple women wrote important programs, Mary Coombs, for example, was the first female programmer on LEO, the first corporate computer in 1952. At NASA, orbital calculations for the Explorer 1 satellite were performed by a group of computers exclusively female. In the same NASA laboratory, Dana Ulery, the first female engineer, developed real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit word size computer, and programming capabilities for NASA's Deep Space Network (Kresser and Sippel 1962). Among women, Margaret R. Fox was also appointed head of the Office of Computer Information in 1966, part of the NBS Institute for Computing and Technology. He held the position until 1975 (Fox 1984). A major breakthrough came in 1969, when a group of programmers at Bell Labs developed UNIX, an operating system written in the C programming language. Its main advantage was portability across multiple platforms, and it soon became popular among business and government entities. Personal computers were rare, and UNIX was not the first operating system. A few years earlier, in 1965, Mary Allen Wilkes designed the first personal computer, the LINC, and wrote LAP, its operating system, considered the first operating system (Clark 1987). Women were not only pioneers in technical programs, however, Joan Ball started a computer dating service in 1964, years before social networks and dating applications (Ball 2014). As during the Great World Wars, women also played an important role during the Cold War. . In the late 1960s, Margaret Hamilton was director of the software engineering division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory working with NASA on the Apollo space program. It programmed the onboard flight software, and its robust architecture was crucial during the aborted Apollo 11 moon landing (Hamilton and Hackler 2008). He coined the term Software Engineering, as the application of engineering to software development in a systematic method (Hamilton and Hackler 2007). Conclusion Women were essential to the development of computing, and their role has been overshadowed by that of men, leading to the alarming number of women occupying less than a quarter of all computing occupations in the United States (Ashcraft, McLain, & Eger 2016). This underrepresentation leads to a male-dominant environment, hostile to women, as can be seen in recent issues with large companies such as Google (Wakabayashi 2017) and Facebook (Conger and Frenkel 2018), and influences its development, since diversity is important in every context. field (Hicks 2017). Another problem arises from their recognition through rewards and recognition. The ACM Turing Award, for example, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to individuals with major technical contributions to the field of computing. In 2019, of the nearly seventy awards given, only three went to women: Frances Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Liskov, and Shafi Goldwasser. All were given after 2006, showing how women have been erased from computing history until recently. In an attempt to reverse this problem, several groups and organizations have been created, such as the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (Gabbert and Meeker 2002) or the Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (Gürer and Camp 2002) with over 36 thousand members. They searchto support and empower women already active in the field, while encouraging girls to get involved in IT and related areas. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay So, although Still suffering from several years of shadowing by men, women in the computing field are fighting for their space, and hopefully, with time, we may have a field with more equity. 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