Michael: Okay, Kevin, "Broad Band." Five words. Go. Kevin: Men get credit, women build. Michael: Ooh, sharp. Mine is: "The internet has a mother." Kevin: I like that. It’s provocative. It completely flips the script on the whole "tech bro" narrative we've been fed for decades. Michael: Exactly. And that's the entire project of the book we're diving into today: Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans. It’s this incredible work of historical recovery. Kevin: What’s fascinating is that the author, Evans, isn't just an academic historian. She's the singer for the band Yacht and a journalist. She brings this really unique, almost compassionate lens to it. Michael: She does, and she personally interviewed many of these pioneers or their families. She set out to correct the male-centric narrative, not by erasing the men, but by simply restoring the women who were cropped out of the historical photos, sometimes literally. Kevin: Wow. So this is a rescue mission for historical memory. I have to ask, where does a secret history like this even begin? I always picture the start of computing with some guy in a lab coat, probably at MIT. Michael: That’s the common picture, but Evans takes us somewhere else entirely. The story doesn't start with a machine. It starts with a job ad.

Kevin: A job ad? For what, a janitor for the first server room? Michael: Not quite. The ad was placed in the New York Times in 1892 by the U.S. Naval Observatory. It was just three words: "A COMPUTER WANTED." Kevin: Hold on. 1892? That's decades before what we think of as the first computers. What did that even mean? Michael: It meant a person. For nearly two centuries, a "computer" was a job title, not a machine. It was someone, usually a woman, who performed complex calculations by hand. They were the original information technology. These women were hired for astronomical calculations, ballistics trajectories during the wars, codebreaking... they were the engine of large-scale scientific research. Kevin: That's blowing my mind. So the original computers were human, and mostly female. Why have I never heard this? Michael: Because the work was seen as clerical, meticulous, and low-status. It was considered "women's work," like being a typist or a telephone operator. This goes all the way back to the very first "programmer," Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s. She saw that Charles Babbage's theoretical Analytical Engine wasn't just a calculator; it could manipulate any symbol—music, letters, anything. She wrote the first algorithm for it, envisioning a future of general-purpose computing. She saw the poetry in the machine. Kevin: So she was the visionary, but the work itself was later framed as... secretarial? Michael: Precisely. And you see this pattern repeat with the ENIAC, one of the first electronic general-purpose computers, built during World War II. The men who built the hardware, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, got all the glory. They were hailed as geniuses. But the people who actually made the machine work? A team of six women, known as the ENIAC Six. Kevin: What did they do, exactly? Michael: They didn't "operate" it; they programmed it. But there were no programming languages, no manuals, no operating systems. They were given the blueprints and the wiring diagrams and had to figure out how to physically wire the machine to solve complex ballistics equations. They had to invent programming as they went along. Kevin: That sounds impossibly difficult. They were basically reverse-engineering a machine that had never existed before. Michael: They were. And their reward? When the ENIAC was unveiled to the press, the women weren't introduced. They weren't even invited to the celebratory dinner. In the official press photos, they were often just background figures, mistaken for models or hostesses. In some cases, they were literally cropped out of the pictures, leaving only the men and the machine. Kevin: That's infuriating. Now, I've heard some critics say the book is more of a collection of "great women" biographies than a deep social analysis. But what you're describing sounds like a very clear, repeating pattern. Michael: It is the central pattern of the book. Evans argues that women have been central to every wave of technology, often in these foundational roles that are initially undervalued. They pioneer the field, establish its importance, and then, as the field gains prestige and money, it gets professionalized and masculinized. The men get the credit, and the women's contributions are reframed as merely operational or, worse, completely forgotten. Kevin: So it's a cycle of innovation, feminization, and then erasure. Michael: Exactly. The women were the original software. But it took another visionary woman to make that software accessible to the rest of the world.

Kevin: Okay, so if the first women were essentially writing the code line by line, who was the person who said, "There has to be a better way"? Michael: That would be the legendary Grace Hopper. "Amazing Grace," as she was known. She was a Vassar math professor who, after Pearl Harbor, felt this patriotic duty to serve. Despite being technically too old and underweight for the Navy, she was so persistent they finally let her in. Kevin: I love that. So she joins the Navy. Where does she end up? Michael: They send her to Harvard to work on the Mark I computer under Howard Aiken. It's this monstrous, 50-foot-long electromechanical beast. Aiken points to it and says, "That is a computing engine." Grace had no engineering background, but she taught herself how to program it by poring over blueprints and codebooks. Kevin: And this is where the famous "bug" story comes from, right? Michael: It is. One day in 1945, the Mark I stopped working. After hours of searching, her team found the culprit: a moth had gotten stuck in one of the mechanical relays, shorting it out. Grace carefully removed it, taped it into the logbook, and wrote, "First actual case of bug being found." Kevin: A literal bug in the system. That's fantastic. But her real contribution was much bigger than that, wasn't it? Michael: Oh, much bigger. The bug story is fun, but her true revolution was in communication. At the time, programming was done in machine code—ones and zeros—or complex mathematical notation. It was a language only a handful of PhDs could speak. Grace had this radical idea: why can't we talk to computers in a language that looks more like English? Kevin: That seems so obvious now, but I imagine it was heresy back then. Michael: It was. She faced huge resistance. The "Neanderthals," as she called them, were the programmers who believed that programming was an elite craft, a kind of dark art. They thought computers could only do arithmetic and that the idea of a computer understanding words was impossible. Grace was a "space cadet" for even suggesting it. Kevin: So how did she do it? How did she teach a machine to understand English? Michael: She created the first compiler, a program she called A-0. A compiler is essentially a translator. It takes instructions written in a higher-level, more human-readable language and translates them into the binary code the machine can execute. She famously said, "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it... they told me computers could only do arithmetic." Kevin: It's like she invented Google Translate, but for humans to talk to machines. Michael: That’s a perfect analogy. Her work led directly to COBOL, the Common Business-Oriented Language, which became the most widely used programming language in the world for decades. It was designed to be readable and maintainable. She democratized programming. She took it out of the hands of the elite "priesthood" and gave it to a much broader audience. She believed technology should serve people, not the other way around. Kevin: And that human-centric approach feels like a thread running through all these stories. It's not just about making the machine work, but making it work for us. Michael: And that thread leads us directly to the next phase. Once computers could understand us, the next question was, how could they help us understand each other?

Michael: By the 80s and early 90s, the internet existed, but it was a very different place. It was mostly text-based, hard to navigate, and overwhelmingly male. Think early bulletin board systems, or BBSs. One of the most famous was The WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. It was a hub for West Coast intellectuals, tech-savvy hippies, and Grateful Dead fans. Kevin: Sounds like a very specific vibe. And I'm guessing, not a lot of women? Michael: Very few. The internet as a whole was maybe 10-15% female at the time. The culture was often hostile or exclusionary. Which is what makes the story of Stacy Horn so remarkable. She was a New Yorker who tried The WELL and found it just didn't fit. She said it felt like being at a party in California where you didn't know anyone. Kevin: So she decided to throw her own party. Michael: Exactly. In 1990, she founded ECHO—the East Coast Hang-Out. She wanted to create an online salon for New Yorkers, a place to talk about art, books, film, and life. A digital version of a Greenwich Village coffeehouse. Kevin: How did she even start something like that? It's not like you could just launch a website. Michael: She did it with sheer force of will. She wrote a business plan, invested her own savings, and put the server in her apartment. She would go to parties and art openings and literally hand out flyers. She taught new users the complex Unix commands needed to log on. But her most radical act was her approach to community. Kevin: What was so different about it? Michael: She was intentional about building a space where women felt welcome. She actively recruited women. She listened to their concerns about online harassment. She created private, women-only conferences, like WIT (Women in Telecommunications), where they could talk freely. She even made membership free for women for a time. Kevin: Wait, she made it free for women? Did it work? Michael: It worked spectacularly. At a time when the rest of the internet was 85% male, ECHO was nearly 50% female. And that changed everything. The conversations were different. The culture was different. It was witty, intellectual, and deeply social. Horn's axiom was "People go online for information; they stay for the company." Kevin: That’s a powerful insight. It feels like we've lost that. Today's social media is built for engagement at any cost, not for company. What was the secret sauce at ECHO that we're missing now? Michael: Accountability. Because ECHO was a local New York community, people met in real life. They had monthly meetups at a bar. They played softball together. They formed a house band. You were less likely to be a jerk to someone online if you knew you might have to face them over a beer or across the softball field the next week. The virtual community was grounded in physical reality. Kevin: That feels like the complete opposite of the anonymous, global free-for-all we have now. It was a curated, local, and accountable community. Michael: It was. Stacy Horn and other women like her weren't just building platforms; they were building cultures. They were the architects of connection. They understood that the internet's true potential wasn't just as an information library, but as a human space.

Michael: When you look at the whole arc of the book, this incredible pattern emerges. First, women were the original "computers," the invisible human software running the calculations. Kevin: Right, the ones who were literally written out of the history books. Michael: Then, you have pioneers like Grace Hopper, who acted as translators. They built the compilers and languages that allowed humans and machines to communicate, democratizing the entire field. Kevin: They made the technology speak our language. Michael: And finally, you have women like Stacy Horn, who became the community architects. They took this technology and asked the most important question: "What is this for?" And their answer was: "It's for connection. It's for community." They built the first social spaces online, with rules, culture, and a sense of belonging. Kevin: So, the hardware, the software, the language, and the community. They were there at every single step. Michael: Every step. And that’s the profound takeaway from Broad Band. The history of the internet isn't just a story of wires and code. It's a human story. And for too long, we've only been telling half of it. Claire Evans ends her book with a powerful thought that has stuck with me. She says, "Even when women were invisible, it never means they weren’t there." Kevin: Wow. That really reframes everything. It makes you wonder what other histories we've gotten wrong. What other "invisible" architects are out there in other fields, whose stories are just waiting to be told? Michael: That's the question, isn't it? It's a reminder to always look for the people behind the technology, the stories behind the official narrative. Kevin: A powerful and necessary reminder. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.