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Hello everyone. Right before I start, I know this is America. I'm pretty jealous, but I do know this is America, and you're big on swears. I can hope that my adorable British accent will let me get away with some sort of PG-13 level Marvel movie swearing. Before I tell you a story of programming history, let’s have a bit of audience participation.
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These two circles are different sizes. I know it looks like they're the same, but there's a fundamental difference. By a show of hands, who thinks the blue circle is bigger? And who thinks the red circle is bigger? You're all wrong! What was your instinct when the two circles appeared? That they were the same, right?
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So, the real question is, how many white guys with a microphone did it take to tell you that these two identical circles were different before you shrugged, said 'sure,' and tried to choose between them? Hold that thought as we bounce around the last hundred years or so. Welcome to Cambridge, an ancient seat of learning. This is probably how you imagine it.
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It's 2018. I'm seated in the brutal-looking 60s-built Churchill College in some stifling lecture hall, much like you all are now. This is a software business conference, featuring lectures from the good and the great on how to build successful software businesses. What the hell am I doing there? Well, I'm the CTO of a small software company, having started my computing journey 30 years ago copying code from magazines into my Acorn Electron, later earning a computer science degree, and being a relatively early adopter of Rails.
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I'm not an entrepreneur, as my receding hairline will attest. I've got decades of experience handcrafting artisanal internet bugs. Anyway, back in the room, the speaker comes on and starts to tell their story, and I had never heard of this person. The story they told exploded what I thought I knew about our industry. Aged five, Steve Shirley arrived in Britain as a child refugee as part of the Kindertransport, attending conference school in the Midlands, then high school close to the Welsh border. Steve excelled in mathematics, but given their situation, faced a battle to be allowed to take it.
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You see, in the early 50s, there was no standard curriculum in the UK, and each school ran according to the whims of their headmasters. After leaving school and becoming a British citizen, Steve joined the post office research station in North London, part of the early Vanguard of the UK's post-war computing boom. Evenings were filled with an honors degree in mathematics and another job followed. After a decade of firing code into more early computers, such as this little beauty, the ICT 1301, the programming career had been pretty typical at that time.
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But here's where the story takes a turn. In 1962, Steve Shirley incorporated freelance programmers with a capital of six pounds, approximately the cost of one venti gingerbread latte these days and frankly not that much more back then. Later, the company became F International. As they said in the memoir, it sounded mad. Drawbacks included the following: I had no capital to speak of, no experience running a company, no employees, no office, no customers, and no reason to believe there was any interest in buying my product. Nobody sold software in those days; in so far as it existed, it was given away for free.
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So what would happen to the freelance programmers? Would our hero be successful? Well, spoilers, this was a conference about the business of software, and it was a retrospective. F International prospered for decades. Projects included planning routes for Tate & Lyle sugar lorries, calculating depot locations for oil companies, and even the black box for Concorde. They went international, expanding into the U.S., European countries, and even India.
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In 1996, they floated on the stock exchange, only two years before I started my degree. So this is a huge commercial success story in the UK, and they pioneered a few interesting things. The workforce was primarily remote in the 1960s. They worked with overnight posts and then telephones when they became available. The workforce was flexible, both in the hours they worked and the strength of the independence of the team. Folks only had to work 20 hours a week when involved in a project, and management and staffing was spread across the country.
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The profits were shared. In 1981, Steve Shirley established a shareholders trust and progressively gave a controlling share of the whole company to the workforce. So when the IPO happened in '96, over 70 employees became millionaires. Oh, one more thing: of the first 300 staff, 297 were women. Steve Shirley made a success by hiring an unorthodox workforce, even as the rest of the industry struggled to find programmers, as the business world computerized.
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And there was a reason for that. This is who was on stage: she's an OBE, she's a Dame. She’s a Companion of Honor, which is one of the highest honors you can receive in the UK—there are only ever 65 at one time. Alongside Dame Stephanie, there currently are Ian McKellen, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Judy Dench, and multiple former prime ministers. And I hadn’t heard of her or her trailblazing software company at all. She exuded warmth, insight, and elegance from the stage.
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Here she is in her TED Talk. For years, I was the first woman this or the only woman that. In those days, I couldn't work on a stock exchange, drive a bus, or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn’t open a bank account without my husband’s permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay. Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society, because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities.
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I couldn’t really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the point of changing my name from Stephanie to Steve in my business development letters, just to get through the door before anyone realized that I was a she. Computing wasn’t just happening in dear old Blighty in the 50s and 60s; it was also happening in the mighty United States of America. Let’s cross the Atlantic and see what was happening after the war.
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The Second World War had seen the development of early computers under the conditions of wartime secrecy. Actually, stop! We have to go back a bit further. But before we do, let’s just admire the background for a second or two. The term 'computer' has been in use since the 17th century. It was originally a job for human beings, but it wasn’t until World War One that it became a profession. In both world wars, large numbers of human computers were required on both sides; these folks used the power of math to make math grids and artillery tables, and most of these new essential human computers were women.
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Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City in 1906. A curious child, she once dismantled seven alarm clocks to see how they worked before her mother managed to stop her. She excelled at mathematics, achieving degrees from Vassar and NYU. She married in 1930, taking her husband Vincent's surname. Grace Hopper got a PhD in 1934 from Yale and returned to Vassar, where she was on the tenure track. She took the classes that no one else wanted to teach, updating her old schoolwork with new and entertaining techniques, building imaginary worlds in a mechanical drawing class, earning growing student numbers in previously untrendy subjects.
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She faced unbridled resentment from her male peers. Then, when Grace was 36, this happened: Pearl Harbor—not the Michael Bay film. She attempted to enlist but was rejected because she was too old, too light, and too valuable as a mathematics professor, so she joined the reserves anyway. She graduated top of her class and, to her surprise, was sent to Harvard to become the world’s third computer programmer on a 10,000-pound machine called the Mark One.
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Grace was invaluable in understanding the machine's capabilities and managing the volatile designer of the machine, Howard Aitken. Aitken gave Grace a code book with some strange-looking commands and one week to write a program to compute some interpolation coefficients to 23 decimal places. The problem wasn’t difficult for Grace; she had a math PhD, but the machine was a mystery. This was the first computer—there wasn’t a precedent or indeed a manual. She worked incredibly hard, applying her powerful intellect and extraordinary work ethic, not bothered by the less-than-friendly welcome from the male programmers who preferred not to sit next to the woman.
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Aitken's boat was a strict military operation, meaning rank and competence were uppermost. This allowed Hopper to rise through the ranks to become likely the most important figure in the organization. This page from her logbook contains a sellotaped moth that was attracted by the lights and flew into the Mark 1, getting killed by the relays. The caption reads: "The first actual case of a bug being found." Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was created.
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This buzzing, electrically dangerous room of cables and vacuum tubes was similar but orders of magnitude faster than the Mark One. There was a flaw with this new beast of a machine: while the Mark One took instructions on paper, the ENIAC needed to be configured manually; cables and switches were plugged and flicked. It could blaze through problems in comparison to the Mark One. Unfortunately, cable management was terrible. What Grace found when she arrived at the University of Pennsylvania was that she was by no means the only female programmer; there were many other women who’d been working in similar roles.
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These women were key to this pioneering work and later became known as the ENIAC 6. ENIAC was eight feet tall, 80 feet long, and weighed thirty tons, and again, there was no manual. As Betty Jean described it, “ENIAC was a son of a program” — but program it they did, literally moving around inside the giant machine. The Betties were the programming aces of the project. When the ENIAC was to be unveiled to the scientific community, they were given an incredibly short 12-day deadline to perform an unprecedented set of calculations.
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It seems tech keynotes have always been prepared this way. Despite working around the clock and drinking copious amounts of apricot brandy the night before, there were still serious errors in the program. The Betties checked and rechecked against a test program that was hand-calculated by their colleagues; dejected, they slumped home, fearing the big demo was going to be an embarrassing disaster. I think we've all been there.
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But, like all good programmers, the answer came to Betty Holberton in her sleep. She made for the lab early, knowing precisely which of the 3,000 switches to flick to solve the problem. The lights were dimmed and the calculation for the ballistic trajectory rippled across the neon lights of the ENIAC in merely 20 seconds—faster than the projectile could have moved through the air. The demo had gone off spectacularly. The Betties hustled to print souvenir results and handed them to the audience.
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The event made headlines. The women remembered flashbulbs, but the photos in the papers showed only men posing with the thinking machine, sold as a giant brain doing thousands of calculations per second. But as we all know, the computer was not thinking; it was just doing what it was told, really, really fast. In reality, the only giant brains in the room were the women walking amongst the panels on ENIAC, programming it. Oh, there are a couple of problems with the New York Times' breakfast reporting here.
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The work wouldn’t have been done by a man before the ENIAC, and it willfully disregards the weeks of labor by a group of brilliant women to produce the demo. This complex and creative programming work was seen as sub-professional or clerical. Had they known how crucial programming would be, said Jennings, they might have been more hesitant to give the job to women. On the 50th anniversary of ENIAC in '95, they rebuilt the room-sized computer on an integrated chip that could fit in your hand.
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At the same time, Catherine Kleinman contacted the organizers of the Women in Technology International Conference to see how they were planning to mark the 50-year anniversary of the ENIAC 6, except nobody there had any knowledge of the women she was referring to. The ENIAC 6 had been so thoroughly swept under the rug that even a group dedicated to furthering the status of women in technology had no knowledge of the work they had done five decades earlier. These women invented the idea that you could write programs.
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The next time you write a line of code, run a complicated program, or find a bug, know that it's in part thanks to the six women who programmed the ENIAC more than 75 years ago. Now, despite the erasure of their work, both at the time and for decades afterward, these women and women like them have made significant impacts on the development of our profession. Over the course of their long careers, Grace Hopper would go on to write the first compiler in 1951, and Betty Holberton would work with Grace together after the war when the military projects ended.
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When Betty Holberton worked on UNIVAC, which was a successor to ENIAC, she not only ensured a numerical keypad was placed next to the keyboard for the first time but also persuaded the mechanical engineers to encase the black machine in a different colored case. And so, a billion beige computers bloomed. She also wrote a program called the sort-merge generator, which, according to Hopper, marked the first time a program had ever been used to write another program. The spectacular dexterity wrapped up in such a concept that we now take for granted was, of course, initially resisted by the powers that be.
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Later iterations of Grace's compilers became Math-Matic and Flomatic, and then in 1959, she buttonholed a well-known scientist and explained she thought it was about time to create a common programming language for business. And you've seen the picture of Grace; you don’t mess with Grace. So, the meetings followed, and general agreement formed in the fledgling industry. By using Grace's Navy connections, the Department of Defense stepped in to find financial sponsors for the work, and CODASYL was formed.
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Multiple committees were formed with different time horizons, and as we all know, committees once formed become unbelievable, expanding messes where deadlines disappear decades into the future. CODASYL was no different. Grace immediately realized that the only group with a chance at succeeding was the short-range team. Luckily, this was Betty Holberton, Mary Hawes (another Hopper protégé), and Jean E. Samet. They referred to themselves as the PDQ committee because they needed it done pretty damn quick, and three months later, COBOL was the result.
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Now, it’s pretty much no one's favorite programming language by today's standards, but it got done, adopted, refined, and more importantly, it was used because of the efforts of these three women. To give you an idea of the impact of COBOL, it's estimated that in the year 2000, 80% of all production code in the world was written in it. In fact, I even did some dangerous research.
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Does anyone have a clue how many Ruby jobs there are on LinkedIn? There are 12,000 Ruby jobs on LinkedIn. But there are 5,000 COBOL jobs on LinkedIn. So I mean, yeah, we win, right? At the jobs ball in the world’s weirdest social network. But I mean, it’s a pretty good showing for a 60-year-old language that no one really likes. Now, we’re by no means special in this software world. If you went moderately well-off, heterosexual, or a white guy, it has sucked for most of history.
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Here are some other brief examples: the fathers of DNA, Crick and Watson's groundbreaking work on the double helix was based in part on the largely uncredited work of Rosalind Franklin. In 1967, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar as a research student. She found it by direct observation using miles of recordings and crawling along them on her hands and knees, looking for unusual deviations in a single wiggling line until she recognized the signal. She had to overcome her skeptical supervisor, Anthony Hewish, to prove her discovery of a neutron star. Guess who got the Nobel Prize for Physics? Not Jocelyn.
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Margaret Hamilton, the lead developer for the Apollo flight software, and the famous tweet with the piles of paper is credited with having coined the term software engineering. She said, 'I fought to bring software legitimacy so that it, and those building it, would be given its due respect.' Thus, I began using the term software engineering. When I first started using the phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time.
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In 1968, in Garmisch, Germany, NATO convened a conference where a great semantic change was agreed. Between ski runs, it was decided we would no longer call it programming; it would become software engineering—a new professional version of our job. General societies, hiring practices, certification, formal education requirements—this joke had become serious, and the dudes had swept in and claimed it. What had begun as women’s words, starting as women’s work, had been made masculine.
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Radia Perlman holds over 100 patents, including the spanning tree protocol—an algorithm so fundamental to our modern self-healing networked world that it's no exaggeration to say that without it, no internet, no RailsConf. Ever heard of her? Susan Fowler joined Uber in 2015 as a site reliability engineer. On her first day, her manager sent her a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship apparently and looking for new sexual partners. Apparently, her manager said he was trying to stay out of trouble at work, but you know he couldn’t help it because he was emailing people asking them to have sex with them on their first day.
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She immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR. Nothing much happened. Her 2017 blog post about the pervasive sexualized culture at Uber—the emails were only the tip of the iceberg—eventually led to the removal of the CEO. Now, so far I’ve mostly used white, well-to-do women in my examples. The suppression of other minority folks or folks of other stereotypes intersects even greater. In recent years, we’ve dramatized these stories.
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Alan Turing’s cracking of the code for the Nazis’ Enigma machine arguably shortened the Second World War by months or, if not years! A man prosecuted by the state for his homosexuality and chemically castrated. Dorothy Vaughn, Catherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson's battles with segregation were in addition to the difficulty of their work as human computers during the space race. The book is better than the film, even though the film has gems. These films have omissions, fictions, timeline compressions, and composite characters, as there are in any dramatization of real life.
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In this presentation, I’ve jumped around these pioneering women’s lives to highlight injustice as well as success. The fact remains: everyone featured in this presentation has had troubles and obstacles over and above what someone who looked like me would have. Their contributions were minimized, re-legislated, blocked, forgotten, or ignored.
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That’s an excellent suggestion, Mrs. Triggs; perhaps one of the men here would like to make it. Because let’s be honest, this talk's a bit awkward, isn’t it? The painful truth in this cartoon from Punch is apparent at this conference too. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I'm a white, middle-class, middle-aged British man with a computer science degree who played a lot of video games as a kid. I couldn’t be any more generic computer guy if I tried.
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But it’s not like this information, which I’ve represented to you, whilst perhaps new to some folks, was locked in a secret ladies-only history vault. I just had to look for it. This talk isn’t aimed at folks in the room who don’t look like me; it’s aimed at the folks in here who do. And let’s be honest: it’s aimed even more at the folks who aren’t in this room, because they skipped the talk because it’s not about programming.
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I guess the reason I think it’s okay for me to say these things, to point this stuff out, is because I look like you, and perhaps you'll pay attention. So here are a few things we can do to make the situation better. Where can we borrow some great ideas? How about Web 2? Flickr? It was like Instagram, except Yahoo bought it and ran it into the ground instead of Facebook. One of the founders, Stuart Butterfield, went on to create the unmanageable nightmare hellscape of Slack, in which you spend your days.
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But the community that grew around the product was the responsibility of co-founder Katarina Fake, and she was behind the first draft of their community guidelines. So let us, like those skiing chaps in Garmisch, steal a great idea from a clever woman.
