Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

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

• 
  Marta

  Women invented computer programming and were instrumental at every turn where the hardware the boys created, but failed to think of its applications, needed to be put to use. After the girls have proven that this was serious science - the boys pushed them out if it.... again and again. Women would take over “fringe” areas (such as hypertext and social networks) but not taken seriously, until the men took over.
  
  This book explores the role of women in computing and the Internet. The first half is strong, covering the early programming pioneers like Grace Hopper, the Eniac Six, Radia Pearlman. However, when she switches to online communities, the book becomes bogged down in boring details, repetitive office and dot-com stories. Perhaps the topic itself is boring - social networks are much better experienced than written about - but I suspect the writing style. I was skimming starting halfway through.
  
  I was also not happy that she cut off at the dot-com bust. Much development of women online has taken place since. If you are going to have a chapter on girl gamers, do some research now - gamergate, for example, the harrassment of women game programmers, but also the emergence of games that appeal to all sexes should have been covered. Instead Evans chooses to cover Purple Moon, a company who designed games that reinforced gender stereotypes, rather than fighting them. Boring, and a company that went bust for a good reason.
  
  Cyberfeminism is another chapter that singles out a short-lived and rather intellectually snobbish phenomenon - whereas the web now is abuzz with feminism of a very different, more real, more inclusive sort. It felt tacked on and weak.
  
  I am a programmer, early (1996) adopter of the Internet. I was a game developer in the late 90ies (yes, we also went down with the dot-com bust). I also have experienced the sexism, and the crazy phenomenon that while there were few women when I started, there are even less now. The boys have just gotten nastier - and no matter how good you are at your job, or how much you love it, there is only so much you can take before leaving. “I don’t know what you did but I don’t like it” was something a male collegue told me when he got angry at me for fixing some bugs - for which he should have been appreciative. Or whenever I said something, they would argue with me, then tell me that I had a personality problem of being argumentative. Or if I made an error, it was carelessness, if a man did, it was part of the job. So that sort of shit.
  
  Anyway, I am digressing. This book intensely interested me, and it sort of delivered in the first part, but the second part is a failure. I don’t even know what Evans was going for. You could come up with a much more interesting story of women on the internet - but you would have to include now. Also, use some more inventive style. I suggest taking pointers from women on the internet. Include photos, little extras, jokes... fun stuff. This book is just way too dry.
• 
  Jean

  This is an interesting book about the history of women coders, engineers, mathematicians, entrepreneurs as well as visionaries who helped create and shape the internet. Evans even discusses Ada Lovelace, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron.
  
  The book is well written and researched. Evans is a journalist so the writing style is that of a journalist. Evans reviews the stories of women scientists such as the famous Grace Hopper, who worked on Harvard Mark One, to more recent women such as Stanford University scientist Elizabeth Feinler. She also includes programmer Brenda Laurel, a gamer entrepreneur. I found the story about Radia Perlman most interesting. Perlman invented a protocol for moving information to the way computers are networked. I had no idea so many women have achieved so much with so little recognition. I highly recommend this book.
  
  I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is nine hours. The author narrated the book.
  
• 
  Kara Babcock

  Every so often, you read a non-fiction book that just speaks to you, that sticks with you because it’s not just informative but because it fits your level of background knowledge and expands your understanding of a topic perfectly. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet is such a book for me. Claire L. Evans traces the development of the modern Internet from its precursors, the earliest mechanical and electronic computers, all the way to the present day—all through the lens of the women who computed, built, designed, programmed, and shepherded us into the Information Age. Evans not only smashes the myth that women don’t like computers or programming; she demolishes the idea that women are a recent addition to the tech world. As Evans demonstrates, women were here first.
  
  Broad Band begins at the beginning. Evans goes all the way back to Ada Lovelace (I’m actually writing this review on Ada Lovelace Day—I should have timed this better so I could publish it today). I took the time to annotate and underline my copy of this book, because Evans just keeps saying it so well:
  
  

  Women turn up at the beginning of every important wave in technology. We’re not ancillary; we’re central, often hiding in plain sight.

  
  
  Evans goes on to demonstrate exactly how women were essential with each evolution and revolution of the tech industry. I loved reading about Grace Hopper and other early computer programmers. In particular, Evans notes about Hopper:
  
  

  Years later, when Grace was an established figure in the new field of computer programming, she’d always assign the hardest jobs to the youngest and least experienced members of her team. She figured they didn’t have the sense to know what was impossible.

  
  
  As a teacher, I love this. I love that mindset. But I digress—Hopper and the other early programmers did not have it easy like we do today. They were brilliant mathematicians who were then asked to translate their mathematical understanding into algorithms a computer, mechanical or electronic, might understand. Later, they were working with machine code. When I first started programming, I started with HTML and then interpreted languages like PHP and Python—I had it easy. Plus, because I’m a man, no one gave me a hard time. Tall, white, and nerdy, everyone just assumed I was good with computers. But Evans belies that stereotype: not only have women always been “good with computers” (hell, the first computers were literally women), but they come from all walks of life and have a vast diversity of cultural, political, and social backgrounds. Women are not a monolith.
  
  So Evans goes on to name-drop other significant individual women in STEM, even as we see the computer industry emerge from the post-war United States economic boom. She points out how “the professionalization of 'software engineering' marked a sea change in the gender demographics of computing”—i.e., once programming turned into a profession rather than simply a menial job, suddenly it became men’s domain instead of women’s, despite the nature of the task remaining the same.
  
  Evans does not limit herself to the discussion of the “hard” aspects of computer science either. She showcases the pioneering efforts of women in building communities online. I was so entranced by the section on Jake Feinler, who ran the NIC in its early days and was essentially the equivalent of WHOIS and Google all rolled into one. This was a part of the history of the Internet I had literally never heard of before, and here it is, laid bare and told clearly and humorously by Evans and the people she interviewed. Similarly, I had never heard of ECHO or women.com or any of these other early ventures. I had never heard of Microcosm or early adventures into hypertext that pre-date the World Wide Web. Seriously, this book is so dense and rich with information yet so easy to read. And it highlights that how a story and history are told really affects the way people conceptualize our understanding of technology. The idea that “Tim Berners-Lee” “invented” the “World Wide Web” is such a gross oversimplification—and you don’t have to read this book to know that, but Evans provides such a rich context into these events, which were all happening when I was a young’un.
  
  Also, I really appreciate that Evans highlights how the Internet and the World Wide Web did not become the utopian cyberspace dream that many people (of various genders) hoped it would be. She catalogues the seemingly inevitable decline of the frontier of the Web, pointing out that the Web didn’t fix our problems with community—we just brought those problems online with us. This might seem painfully obvious to those of us who spend too much time on places like Twitter these days, but it was not a foregone conclusion in the early days of the Web—and there are still too many people now who think that just one more brilliant technological solution, one more killer app, might somehow fix what is ultimately a social problem—we just love being jerks towards each other.
  
  Similarly, Evans takes some time to acknowledge and include trans women in this discussion. She highlights the difficulties that some trans women encountered: even as the Internet made it possible for them to express their gender identity safely when it might not be possible to do so in their offline lives, if they were out as trans online, they could face exclusion from “women-only” spaces. Evans recounts one particularly difficult moment in the history of ECHO in this record. I wish she had done a little more—she could have mentioned people like Lynn Conway or Danielle Bunten Berry. I realize that perhaps she was limited for space, or perhaps she would prefer to leave that for an #ownvoices author—but trans women are women, and their stories and experiences in the “untold story of the women who made the Internet” are valuable and deserve inclusion. So, kudos to Evans for mentioning this topic, could do better next time.
  
  Overall: for young millennials like myself, that generation born in the late 1980s/early 1990s who were old enough to embrace the Web pre–social media but are too young to appreciate its origins, Broad Band is essential reading. I can’t really comment on what people much older than me (people for whom this is contemporaneous history) or younger than me (the so-called “digital native” generation for whom smartphones have always existed) might make of this. For someone my age, someone with a more-than-passing-interest in the history of technology and computers and how this has shaped our society, Broad Band is just phenomenal. I learned so much from this book; it is so well-written; and it is such a great tribute to the plethora of women who have been erased, overlooked, or under-appreciated for far too long.
  
  
  
• 
  Peter Tillman

  I enjoyed this historical review of computer technology and the origins of the Internet. You've likely heard of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, but past that was mostly new territory for me. I liked the author's style and depth of research. The author takes things as they come, but women in computer tech have had a tough time from the start: in the pre-electronics days, a "computer" was a person with a mechanical calculator, and the bosses generally hired women because they would work for half the pay of men, and were more conscientious and reliable too.
  
  The pay is better now, but women still aren't welcomed into most computer-tech jobs. The book avoids histrionics, but my impression is that the men enjoy playing alpha-male games, and the industry is poorer for discouraging almost half of the potential talent pool. And a lot of the problems in (for example) the social-media companies would likely be better handled by smart, savvy, consensus-building technical women. That's what they did, when given the chance. But most of the qualified technical women have decided to do something else because, well, read the book.
  
  My favorite story is about Dr. Brenda Laurel, Combat Epistemologist -- a pioneer game designer for teen and preteen girls. Games that were popular, genuinely educational and commercially successful. Sadly, her company didn't survive the dot.com collapse. And no one else seems to be selling such games for girls.
  
  Recommended for people in the industry, especially women. The future could be better!
• 
  Dan

  This was a detailed, in-depth look at the contributions of women pioneers in computer science, the internet, and the web. The book is an example of well-done historical storytelling -- lots of interviews, stories, and first-person accounts discussing topics familiar and unfamiliar. Many of the anecdotes were things I'd never known about before, but sounded like something I would have wanted to be a part of. The research was thorough and the featured women were carefully selected to cover an interesting mix of topics.
  
  I thought the story got more interesting after the now-well-known tales of Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. We ventured into all kinds of interesting territories in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, fascinating stories about early computers and programming, pre-web internet communities, and a much more vibrant Silicon Alley than I had ever known. It made me nostalgic for an internet I'd never known -- and reinforced my belief that those times would never come again. It was an interesting choice to end the narrative at the dot-com bust, but appropriate -- many of the stories of the early 21st century are still in progress, and another book or author will have to do them justice.
  
  This was an engaging and quick read. I listened on audio. Broadly recommended for anyone interested in the history of computing, women's history, or great narrative history.
• 
  Andrew Louis

  A book where I had trouble deciding which paragraphs *not* to highlight. Incredible combination of original research, narrative, and politics.
• 
  Deborah

  Very interesting, highly recommended.
• 
  Paya

  Świetna książka! Kompletnie nic nie wiem o historii komputerów, internetu, o rozwoju myśli związanej z dziedziną IT, a tu wszystko to dostałam i to jeszcze śledząc losy kobiet, które brały bezpośredni udział w najważniejszych odkryciach na tym polu. Dla mnie to niezwykle wciągająca pozycja, raz, że opowiedziana z perspektywy, którą lubię, a dwa zapraszająca mnie do kompletnie nieznanego mi świata i przy tym dobrze napisana.
• 
  LAPL Reads

  Who made the Internet? Popular culture might have you picture a young, white, nerdy man as the architect and designer, the artist and innovator, behind the Internet. Maybe he’s arrogant and standoffish. Maybe he’s shy and brilliant. He probably wears glasses. There are people like him in the story of the Internet, but his story isn't the only one. There are lots of other people who contributed to creating this valuable resource--hundreds of stories behind the making of the Internet. Women also made the Internet, and their stories can help us understand their contributions. It is only if we can find those stories to tell others.
  
  The Internet is a complicated thing. It was built by people working over several generations, reacting to numerous forces, and working towards different goals. Women were there writing computer languages, programming computers, setting up social service directories, creating methods of navigating ARPANET, creating online communities, and building businesses. They were inventing and innovating, but they were often overlooked, or silenced. For example, when the women who programmed the ENIAC were photographed next to it, the photograph’s caption called them models.
  
  These women deserve to have their stories told while they are around to talk about their experiences. Information on the Internet isn’t static and it isn’t permanent. Operating systems and media become obsolete. Old programming languages are superseded by new ones. Links die. A magazine published on a floppy disk in 1992 is virtually unplayable today.
  
  Luckily, Claire L. Evans was able to find and interview many of the women in her book, Broad Band: The untold story of the women who made the Internet. With input from the women, from their friends and coworkers, Evans shares their stories. With compassion and a keen eye researching primary sources, she sheds light on how the Internet came to be what it is today.
  
  Reviewed by Andrea Borchert, Librarian, Science, Technology & Patents Department
• 
  Stephen

  When the ENIAC was first displayed for the public, its proponents bragged that it could do complex mathematical calculations in seconds which would have taken a skilled man hours upon hours. Well...baloney. The ENIAC was an admirably complex array of metal, but without the human beings who had pored over its every component, turning their brains into maps of circuit boards, creating the very language that was needed to put that array of metal to work -- it was useless. Hours and hours of human effort had gone into that little calculation, but they weren't man-hours. The programmers of the ENIAC were six women, descendants of the calculating computer pools of the late 19th century. Broad Band is their story, and the story of other lady pioneers of the computer age.
  
  
  I'll admit that I had no idea any of these women existed. Histories of of early computing and the internet are a favorite of mine, but I usually begin further along in the story, with more user-friendly machines like the PDP-10 and the advent of networks. I was a little leery of the book given the asinine blurb on the back -- "alpha nerds and brogrammers"? Really? Thankfully, the funny title brought me, and glad I am because I never heard of these women...and some of them are really worth knowing. Grace Hopper, for instance, was deeply involved in the Harvard Mark-1 and the UNIVAC, and she pionered the use of subroutines to speed up coding, as well as created the first compilers. COBOL, which at one time was the language of 80% of existing code, was based on her work. A woman once refused admittance to the services during World War 2 because of her age would become a Rear Admiral before her life's computing work was done. Another remarkable subject here is Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, whose Network Information Office created and maintained a directory of...the internet. Working for the still-nascent ARPANet, Feinler was the master of all information about it. Her team also created many basic protocols, both under-the-hood things most users wouldn't recognize as well as creating the original web extension: ".com". The women who follow were also trail-blazers, experimenting with social networks (New York's "ECHO" bbs, which could boast a 40% female population), as well as digital magazines distributed on floppy disks. Surprisingly, ECHO is still around, though other projects like Word magazine are long gone.
  
  
  Broad Band effectively mixes biography and tech history, and the goal from the start doesn't overshadow the actual content. That is, most of the subjects should be included in histories of web regardless of their sex, given their importance. I say most because I'm not sure about the website creators of the nineties; I don't know enough about the web at that transitional moment to read Broad Band in context. There were some claims that seemed specious, like references to Al Gore being the key player in making the internet a thing known to the public, and there's a huge discrepancy in the estimate given for ECHO membership. Evans says it peaked at 40,000, while The Atlantic marks the peak as...2,000. There's no way of knowing which is more accurate, but given that it was only accessible via a paid membership, I'm tempted to think Evans' is closer -- she interviewed the ECHO host herself. The meat of the book seems to get leaner and leaner as it wears on, until at the end we're reading about how computers are couched in "masculine" language like..."crash" and "execute". Despite the late-game weaknesses, there's a lot of fun information here about how the web as we know it evolved.
• 
  L. McCoy

  WARNING: THIS REVIEW/RANT CONTAINS SOME DISCUSSION ABOUT GRAPHIC VIOLENCE IN ART, POLITICS AND STRONG LANGUAGE. IF YOU MIND THOSE LAST 2 THINGS DON’T READ THE BOOK EITHER!
  
  RANT REVIEW:
  This could have been good but goddamn it, the writing is flawed.
  So the book’s subject matter and the things being talked about are very interesting and this is coming from someone who doesn’t have much interest in science and technology nonfiction at all so that shows some sign of something cool. Oh and I did learn quite a bit.
  Unfortunately despite those being the 2 main things I look for in a nonfiction book, this still isn’t a good nonfiction book.
  The writing is dry as fuck honestly and the author who narrates the audio edition of this book sounds as interested in her own writing as I was (which due to the dryness isn’t a good thing). Being an independent I did find the far-left spin rather annoying (this book seems pro-censorship (even calling trolling “violence” which I’m sorry, that is just so asinine that it made me laugh) and anti-capitalist with a bit of a “ugh men” thing to it). Hardly surprising from a VICE “journalist”.
  
  The thing that makes this a 2-star instead of a 3 is how badly written a bit about gaming towards the end is. First of all it mentions games as being for “kids” while even specifically mentioning games like DOOM and Quake which... umm, maybe shit was different back in the day but here’s the 8-minute announcement trailer for the 2015 DOOM game I remember playing (warning: gore-
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQpxDFE...). I didn’t think that chopping demons in half with a fucking chainsaw was considered wholesome family fun so maybe I’m a bit of a prude... or more likely this is the same kinda person that thought Deadpool was another fun superhero movie for the kiddos.
  
  (“It’s a superhero movie, can’t be that crude”)
  Second, it includes some gender stereotyping regarding what a “boy game” or a “girl game” is. Example: It talks about fighting, shooter, and roleplaying (as this book calls, “adventure”) games being for boys and games based on dialogue or things about less fantasy or actiony type themes being for girls... but I know some female gamers who would look at the “girl games” talked about in this book and laugh as they move on to those fighting, shooter and role playing games. Also, a young L. McCoy (which I am male) was fucking obsessed with Animal Crossing as a kid so... yeah, fuck your stereotypes (to be fair I did later move on to shooter games and such as a teen but still). Seriously though I’m writing this review in 2021, right now fans are awaiting an R-rated Mortal Kombat film produced by James Wan (creator of The Conjuring/co-creator of Saw and Insidious for those who aren’t as into the horror genre)... do you think that a big name like Wan would be throwing his money to a big budget, R-rated (so mostly adults but probably a few teens too) film that only appeals to a niche crowd within one gender... I’m no business expert but I somehow doubt it. As a final nail in the coffin, the author goes on to talk shit about “hypersexualized” characters such as Lara Croft (who many female gamers consider empowering and bad-ass) while hypocritically praising stuff like a Barbie game (a character who teaches generations of girls that they need to be hot and have a shit-ton of money to have fun) (I’m not trying to talk bad about Tomb Raider, Barbie or fans of either one, I’m rather neutral regarding both brands but that is some hypocritical horseshit). Ultimately even as a casual gamer, I think this book’s flawed view of gaming is what killed this book.
  
  (Couldn’t resist, just a perfect opportunity)
  So yeah this could have been good but with dry writing, laughably bad political bias and a terrible, gender-stereotype filled section on gaming I can’t recommend this. Maybe someday I’ll find a better book on this subject.
  
  2/5
• 
  Pallavi Mohan

  This. This piece of work resonated with me more than most works have, probably because I lived the history Evans talks about in her closing chapters - the dawn of the hypertext, an entire girlhood searching for female role models in computer science, searching for community and kinship within a forest of hyperlinks - and now, the foray into a field in academia that has a glaring dearth of female representation. Evans gives voice to the unacknowledged, and resurrects on paper the long-diminished achievements of female computer scientists - women who were the actual gamechangers much before men claimed the titles. It is a book that's also immensely relatable for every girl (and boy) growing up in the 80s and 90s when the Internet was spreading its wings at a rate that was at once tentative and explosive. It is as much an ode to the forces behind this phenomenon as it is to the early set of users that contributed to the Internet's wild success.
  
  And between the pages of such a book, I found a little bit of my own voice.
• 
  Vicky

  I had to take a detour in my mind while reading this book to recall 1998-99—the time when I first connected to the Internet on the boxy Compaq machine that my family had at home, thanks to my older cousin who helped us set up a NetZero account. I remember the year before, when it was my turn to state to my classmates what I wanted to be in the future, I said "computer programmer" without fully knowing what it meant. I was in the middle of the chapter about the Echo community in New York when I got nostalgic about spending my teen years growing up on Delphi Forums, Xanga, and LiveJournal. I also miss the feeling of anonymity, clicking links without hesitation to explore websites I have not visited before, playing chess with strangers on Yahoo, publishing bad websites using Dreamweaver and GeoCities, the notification sounds of AOL Instant Messenger. . .
  
  But I am here at the end of 2018, where I just finished reading "the untold story of the women who made the internet," which was all new information for me and as enjoyable as watching episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess or reading fan fiction that corrects the canonical narrative by adding more back- and side- stories of those who made significant contributions but who were egregiously written out or forgotten in the first place. I also really like Claire Evans's prose style and the seamless way she threads all these moments together. While this book is not going to comprehensively profile everyone ever involved, it was a good introduction for me to meet people like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, the ENIAC 6, Jake Feinler, Jaime Levy and learn about projects like the Social Services Referral Directory, so that I have more tech role models beyond Jenny Calendar.
  
  I feel more situated with historical context now to understand details like why computers were beige, how whois registration was developed, the origin of COBOL which I have seen appear in PeopleSoft at work, the appearance of "software engineer" as a title, and how much of ourselves we put into the programs we create for the machine (inspired to visit Mammoth Cave National Park now, too).
• 
  Laura Noggle

  This had been on my want to read shelf for ages, glad I finally got to it.
  
  Very interesting and informative, I learned a lot. We really don't hear much about the women of the time, and this book remedies that. Women were at the forefront of the creation of the internet from day one.
  
  Some parallels to *Hidden Figures* although, the race of the women was not a focal point in Broad Band.
  
  “An irony: even as computer memory multiplies, our ability to hold on to personal memories remains a matter of will, bounded by the skull and expanded only by our capacity to tell stories.”
• 
  Lauren Stoolfire

  Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans is fascinating. How is this not more common knowledge? I liked getting to know the historical aspects of Ada Lovelace and her work, but over the course of the book I was hoping for more of a focus on more modern history. Of course, that historical backing gives us a good foundation for what's coming. Overall, the information of the women who worked oftentimes behind the scenes, is presented in an understandable way, even if you're not much of a computer person. It's odd knowing that so much of the information presented is within my own lifetime and just thinking about how much has changed in the last 30 years. If you enjoyed Hidden Figures, this is a must read.
• 
  Monika

  4.5 Stars. Loved reading this
• 
  Gretchen

  I got this out from the library as an ebook and it's fine. I can definitely see the audience for this, but I had a tough time. Every time I went to go read it on the train I wanted to look out the window instead. Each person felt like they were really discussed for so long with the same points over and over - I would have loved a "highlights" or New Yorker review style piece with this same topic. That's not to say it doesn't deserve book-length treatment, just that I personally wasn't that into it. It's due back and the library and I'm going to cut my losses.
• 
  Anne

  Very interesting history of women and computers. The chapters on the Internet were especially interesting since I felt like I should know it because I lived through it, but I learned a lot.
• 
  Romulus

  Znakomita, żywo napisana książka, która może nie spodobać się wielu męskim frustratom uważającym informatykę, czy świat gier za męskie zajęcie. Co jakiś czas pojawia się w obrębie mojego zainteresowania jakiś shitstorm frustratów z małymi fujarkami, że kobiety pchają się do gier, że programują, wreszcie - że ilość kobiet na kierunkach technicznych uniwersytetów świadczy o tym, że nie są predysponowane do "męskich" dziedzin nauki, czy technologii.
  
  Autorka opowiada historię kobiet, która może rozwścieczyć tychże frustratów. Pierwszymi komputerami (ludzkimi) były kobiety. Już w XIX wieku dokonywanie obliczeń astronomicznych było domeną kobiet. Zanim pojawiła się Ada Lovelace (córka George'a Byrona), która współpracowała z Charlesem Babbagem nad stworzeniem pierwszego pierwowzoru dzisiejszych komputerów. Potem aż do czasów po II wojnie światowej coś co dziś jest informatyką było domeną kobiet. Co więcej, one były pierwszymi autorkami programów. Tak zwana Szóstka od ENIAC-a, grupa błyskotliwych matematyczek, pisała pierwsze nowożytne programy.
  
  I co znamienne, ich sukces od samego początku był deprecjonowany. O ich wkładzie milczano aż do lat 90-tych XX wieku. Pod koniec lat 60-tych XX wieku, kiedy informatyka i komputery zaczęły być uważane za rynek pełen nieograniczonego potencjału, kobiety były z niego wypychane i deprecjonowano ich wkład w jego rozwój. Co zresztą doprowadziło do kryzysu w rozwoju informatyki.
  
  To co udowadnia ta książka to fakt, że kobiety od zawsze były obecne w tych dziedzinach. Jako ich architektki, współtworzyły je. Radia Perlman była autorką protokołu spanning-tree (STP), bez którego nie byłoby współczesnej Sieci. Inne tworzyły pierwsze sieci społecznościowe (Echo istnieje do dziś, poza protokołem www). O rynku gier nie wspominając.
  
  Ta książka opowiada o nieznanej historii kobiet. To jest fascynujące i smutne jednocześnie. Dziś, kiedy programista to synonim faceta, a kobieta w tej roli wygląda jak dziwadło. Szczególnie w popkulturze. Dlatego warto tę książkę przeczytać. Leczy z ignorancji. Aczkolwiek ci wszyscy jęczący na kobiety faceci staną się przez to jeszcze bardziej żałośni. :)
  
  Przypisy to 30 procent objętości ebooka. Warto zwrócić na nie uwagę, ponieważ odsyłają do ciekawych treści i źródeł, niestety w znacznej większości, po angielsku.
• 
  Caleb Ross

  Where some could read the title of the book, Broad Band, and fear that the book will be a dismantling of the efforts of men (and therefore may approach the book with hesitation) others will approach the book wanting such a dismantling. But the book never comes across as aggressive or anti-male. Rather, it simply corrects the common history. The presence of women in technology have largely been buried and in some cases literally cropped out. Broad Band introduces us to the women behind the various technologies that culminated to what we know as the Internet including their work on the earliest military computers through to the punk culture that seeded the personal-made-public ethos that is the Internet as we know it today.
  
  Perhaps most unexpected to me is that Broad Band can be read as a general history of the Internet, and the aim to correct the male-focused history often feels secondary. This just goes to show how integral these women were to the creation of the Internet. Claire L. Evans isn’t stretching to force women into important roles to make a story. The important roles and the story are simply made up of women.
  
  Highly recommended.
• 
  Alex Johnson

  I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but as someone who is peripherally involved with computer science I was intrigued by this topic. If you are interested in learning more about how the internet came to be and the overall importance of women in computing, this book is a satisfactory introduction.
  Evans did a nice job throughout the book honing in on specific women and movements and how they helped build technology today. The writing wasn't phemonal, but there were a few lines I enjoyed.
  The ending was not very well done, and I was disappointed that Evans didn't use the momentum she had built up to say something greater about women in computing.
• 
  Abbey

  This. Was. Fascinating. The classic case of society and culture rewriting history. Also, how much does it freaking suck that something is only “legitimate” once men do it? Women have been on the cutting edge of computing since they were the computers themselves. I had only heard of one of these women before, and that’s a damn shame. Definitely recommend!!
• 
  Joe Kessler

  An interesting survey read, albeit with less of a narrative throughline than I would have expected. Author Claire L. Evans presents a history of the internet's development that focuses on its female pioneers and participants, but there's little beyond gender linking e.g. the early online bulletin-board communities in one chapter with the designers of computer games for young girls in another.
  
  The best part about this book is how much appears to be original research that the writer has assembled by painstakingly tracking down older netizens to record their memories; the worst is probably how the first third of the text consists largely of well-trodden stories of pre-network thinkers like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper (which is not necessarily outside the scope of the project, but does suggest that another title may have been more appropriate for it). As a child of the late 80s, I've enjoyed recognizing touchstones of my digital youth herein, but I wouldn't really call it a definitive account.
  
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• 
  Rosemary

  Fascinating book that works well in audio format. Did leave me wanting to know more, so I would be interested in a part 2 that would continue the history into current times.
• 
  Katie/Doing Dewey

  This is the story of the women who made technological advances that gave us the internet and computers as we know them today. I love stories about women in tech history, so I knew I had to pick it up. The author won me over immediately with her enthusiasm for her own first computer. Then she lost me as she started talking about how the women she interviewed were all people especially good at making computers accessible, although they didn’t create them. Even with her caveats disavowing gender essentialism, this reductionist view of the women in her book was an unfortunate and inaccurate capitulation to sexist stereotypes. Granted, the women she discussed (mostly) didn’t come up with new computer architecture, but some of the software they created was just as fundamental to the technology we have today. For instance, I wouldn’t describe contributions to the development of the internet as simply ‘making computers accessible’, even though that was one result of the technology.
  
  The rest of this book was almost exclusively awesome, despite the somewhat bad beginning. I learned about an amazing array of women without whom our world would look very different. Here are a few new-to-me favorites:
  
  *the Bettys – Betty Snyder and Betty Jean Jennings, who worked on the Enivac and helped create the Univac (including the hardware!)
  *Jake Feinler – came up with the domain system for URLs (.com, .org, etc) and the WHOIS look up of domain owners
  *Radia Perlmen – the ‘mother of the internet’, devised the spanning tree algorithm for directing Ethernet packets (gets data where it needs to go)
  She also covered women I knew more about – Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace – and made the material feel fresh. I really loved learning about the technical advancements these women made. The author’s focus on women as good at the people side of technology did pop up a few other places. In particular, chapters on an adventure game, a women’s website, and a social services directory felt dry to me and didn’t include any technical developments that interested me. Overall, I definitely think this is worth a read. I’d just take the author’s categorization of these women with a grain of salt, because I found their technical accomplishments spectacular completely independent of their impact on accessibility.
  
  This review first published at
  Doing Dewey.
• 
  Alexandra

  I really enjoyed this book.
  
  I wanted it to be longer and more in depth or maybe several volumes.
  
  I feel like I didn't get enough of any one person.