This post is another by InRhythm’s own Sari Morninghawk. For the full post and additional links, check out the original Where My Girls At?” on her website.
Women – Major Contributors to Computer Science
Many computer science pioneers were women. The first computer programmer and the people who programmed the first digital computers were all women. In the early days of computers, programming was considered “women’s work” while building and architecting the machines was mostly left to the men.
- Ada Lovelace published the first algorithm to be run on a mechanical general-purpose computer. She is considered the first computer programmer.
- Women were computer operators on the Colossus, the first programmable, electronic, digital computer at Bletcheley Park.
- The ENIAC programmers, Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Frances Spence, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman programmed without programming languages or tools — because none existed!
- Jean E. Sammet developed the FORMAC programming language and was one of the developers of COBOL.
- Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer programming, invented the first compiler.
- Adele Goldberg, one of the developers of SmallTalk, contributed to concepts in object-oriented programming.
- Shafi Goldwasser has made fundamental contributions to cryptography, computational complexity, computational number theory and probabilistic algorithms.
Leave a Reply