Women's Stories from the Computer Room

摘要

Photographs of early computer laboratories, with their chunky consoles and steel cabinets, always feature smart young women seated at terminals or changing tape drives (see Figure 1). Yet the documented history of modern computing is overwhelmingly male, especially in academic environments. In a bid to restore the balance, I recently interviewed women, almost all mathematics graduates, who had worked in Oxford University's pioneering Computing Laboratory, either as staff, users or students. Their stories reveal the complex ecology that developed around the teaching, research and practice of academic computing between the 1950s and the 1990s, in which women played an essential but often unacknowledged role.