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

Reviewed by paulml

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, by Claire L. Evans, Portfolio, 2018, ISBN: 9780735211759

The history of computers has always been 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 ballistic trajectories by hand.  There was no ENIAC manual to consult, so they got very good at figuring out how it worked.  They also got none of the public credit.  After the war, the women, plus Hopper, moved to the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the world's first big computer company.  After a few years of being very busy, financial troubles forced the company to sell itself to another company.  Remington Rand made business machines and did not 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.  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 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, this is a good place to start.