Women in computing
Grace Hopper documentary - "The Queen of Code"
The Queen of Code at FiveThirtyEight
https://youtu.be/Qwwf866Cfdg (no longer available)
Also, an interview with the director of the short film at NPR, on All Tech Considered: Grace Hopper, ‘The Queen Of Code,’ Would Have Hated That Title
The moth, or first computer “bug” mentioned in the video and audio above.
There’s also a Grace Hopper GitHub sticker (shown below) called the “Gracehoptocat.” The sticker was given out at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
[sidenote: The video clip on FiveThirtyEight has a Javascript embed code, which won’t work on WordPress without some tinkering. Thankfully, “The Queen of Code” video is also hosted on YouTube as shown in this post.]
[sidenote to the sidenote: Now in 2025, most links are broken, the videos are not viewable and 538 or fivethirtyeight.com is being shut-down.]
(Originally published on my old site, "The Digital Imaginary" [imaginary.digital], on March 26th, 2015 -- revised and republished April 1st, 2025.)
The Holmdel Computer Center - Part 2
The Holmdel Computer Center, Part 2 – AT&T Archives (original link).
Alternate link at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
This rare look inside a Bell Labs computer center, specifically the one at the Holmdel location, which was referred to internally as the “HOCC” or the “HO CC”. This film was made as orientation for new employees who would need to use the computer center, and this, part 2 of 2 (see part 1), is about the programming center within the HOCC. One thing that’s notable about this film — different from Part 1 — is the preponderance of women working in the Programmer Services area. Around 1966, 7 years before this film was made, there were over 500 women working in “technical work” at Bell Labs, rather than administrative work, and many were in computing. A book and blog by Nathan Ensmenger examines the sociological history of computing, and why during the 1980s the computing field became more and more the province of men. Stories about women in the early decades of computing still reside in the world of the personal anecdote; it’s hard to assess the exact data on how many women worked in the field in the 1960s and 1970s.
The original video isn’t available on the Wayback Machine, but the YouTube version is embedded below.
(Originally published on my old site, “The Digital Imaginary” [imaginary.digital], on February 17th, 2015 – revised and republished April 2nd, 2025.)