WTFhistory

How People Reacted to Computer Viruses in 1988

"It arrived in the middle of the night. The students were safe…their computers weren’t."

The First Pizza Ever Ordered By A Computer

By the late 1960s, technologists were already inventing the future we now inhabit. Arthur C. Clarke peered into the future and saw a wired world where information and communication would be immediate and borderless. Marshall McLuhan foresaw the rough outlines of what we now call “social media.” And others predicted that email and ecommerce were on the not-so-distant horizon. It should perhaps then come as no surprise that, just a few years later, The Artificial Language Laboratory at Michigan State developed a way for the computer to start doing some everyday commerce — like ordering pizza.

This is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She worked for UNIVAC in 1949 who made some of the first computers ever. In 1951 she discovered the first computer “bug.”. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. “Nobody believed that,” she said. “I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.” You might not know what a compiler is, but it’s the reason you have an Operating System with programs on or a phone with apps. There would be no Windows or Apple or facebook or twitter or tumblr without her. Today 14% of engineers are female. Some thing when wrong. Grace Hopper is a BAMF and more people should know.

GRACE HOOPER ROCKS!!!

personality tests were developed in the 60s in response to widespread unease in academia and the research industry with how many programmers and computer operators were women; the modern image of the programmer as having male-leaning antisocial traits was basically developed by HR managers during the johnson administration

when grace hopper was young she was basically typical of her profession and now people like her are systematically excluded

YES. YES I LIKE HER.

December 10, 1815: Ada Lovelace is born.

Today’s Google Doodle honors Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child and the woman who is popularly credited as “the world’s first computer programmer”. Lady Byron, who separated from Ada’s father just a month after she was born, sought to raise her daughter in a manner that ensured she would not end up like her volatile poet father. Ada, often ill as a child, began studying mathematics at a young age and soon discovered her natural flair for the subject, so strong that one of her tutors, Augustus De Morgan, suggested that she become a mathematician “of first-rate eminence” later in life. In 1833, Ada attempted to elope with another one of her tutors, although her attempt failed, and the entire incident was covered up.

That year, she also met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor with whom Ada shared a close correspondence for the rest of her life. Over a nine-month-long period in 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an Italian memoir regarding Babbage’s Analytical Engine; she supplemented her translation with her own set of notes (which actually ended up longer than the memoir itself) explaining in detail the differences between Babbage’s machine and his Difference Engine. Ada was optimistic about the future of these engines and machines. Although a mathematician, she was not limited by numbers and predicted that someday a more complex descendant of Babbage’s engines “might act upon other things besides number… the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She also provided what is today recognized as “the world’s first computer program” - a proposed algorithm that would generate Bernoulli numbers using the analytical machine. Whether Ada formulated the plan herself, or whether it was the product of close collaboration between herself, Babbage, and associates, or whether it was someone else’s work entirely, remains subject to debate to this day. Babbage, at least, was as impressed by Ada as she was by him; in 1843 he wrote of her:

Fun fact: Grendel shares a birthday with a wildly cool woman of history.