Broad Band Quotes

“Women built empires in the dot-com era, and they were among the earliest to establish and grow virtual communities”
― Claire L. Evans

“If you are looking for women in the history of technology, look first where it makes life better, easier, and more connected. Look for the places where form gives way to function. A computer is a machine that condenses the world into numbers to be processed and manipulated. Making this comprehensible to as many people as possible, regardless of technical skill, is not an essentially feminine pursuit. Nothing is. That being said, the women I talked to all seemed to understand it implicitly and to value it as fundamental, inalienable, and right.”
― Claire L. Evans

“By the mid-twentieth century, computing was so much considered a women's job that when computing machines came along, evolving alongside and largely independently from their human counterparts, mathematicians would guesstimate their horsepower by invoking "girl-years" and describe units of machine labor as equivalent to one "kilo-girl.”
― Claire L. Evans

“Ada [Lovelace] ... you're right. Nobody can see it but you.But you will have inheritors. Granddaughters and great-granddaughters. They will sprout up everywhere, all over the world, and work with the same dogged, unrelenting focus. Other people will keep getting the credit until one day they won't anymore. And Then your history will be written, a hundred times, by teenage girls at their desks in the heart of their kingdoms, on machines beyond your wildest imagination”
― Claire L. Evans

“Women were a nimble workforce capable of working collaboratively in networks and fluid groups-we still speak of secretarial "pools"-adaptable to the needs of the enterprise”
― Claire L. Evans

“Alone, women were the first computers; together, they formed the first information networks. The computer as we know it today is named for the people it replaced, and long before we came to understand the network as an extension of ourselves, our great-grandmothers were performing the functions that brought about its existence”
― Claire L. Evans

“Despite its reputation as a discipline for introverted perfectionists, social skills are valuable in programming-even essential. Grace Hopper understood this, and it's her early self education in a wide range of nontechnical fields that made her such a profoundly competent programmer.”
― Claire L. Evans

“As she [Grace Hopper] told a historian is 1968, to make the link between "the computer people" and the outside world of clients, problems, and possible applications, "you needed people with more vocabularies”
― Claire L. Evans

“when Grace [Hopper[ was an established figure in the new field of computer programming; she'd always assign the hardest jobs to the youngest and least experience members of her team. She figured they didn't have the sense to know what was impossible”
― Claire L. Evans

“the Moore school emphasized working partnerships, with teams of two people seeking out errors in each other's work. Betty Jean and Betty were ideals partners, because they delighted in finding each other's mistakes. They both wanted perfect code and never let their egos get in the way of achieving it.”
― Claire L. Evans

“There were no formal titles, and departments were porous. People worked directly with one another when projects called for it; there was no chain of command, no bureaucracy. Everyone tackled the problems in front of them, taking initiative wherever it led. 'The fact is . . . we all believed so much in what we were doing that we worked together, that's all”
― Claire L. Evans

“She discovered that all her fellow classmates had been taking radios apart since they were seven, and they knew fancy computer words like "input". She felt she'd never catch up”
― Claire L. Evans

“stepping outside of the complexity of a particular implementation to see things in a new way" By removing extraneous details and focusing on one thing at a time, she says, she's able to find the simplest solutions to complex problems”
― Claire L. Evans

“I Try to design things that someone like myself would like to use which is that it just works, and you don't have to think about it at all”
― Radia Perlman