Narrator: In 1892, an unusual advertisement appeared in the New York Times. It was placed by the United States Naval Observatory, and it read simply: "A COMPUTER WANTED." This wasn't a request for a machine. For nearly two centuries, a "computer" was not a thing, but a person—a job title for someone, often a woman, who performed the complex, tedious calculations essential for scientific advancement. These human computers charted the stars, calculated ballistic trajectories, and laid the mathematical groundwork for the modern world. Yet, their stories, and the stories of the women who followed them into the age of electronic computing, have largely been erased from the dominant narrative of technological history.

In Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, author Claire L. Evans rectifies this omission. The book argues that history often celebrates the men who built the machines, while ignoring the users, designers, and programmers—many of them women—who truly changed the world by making those machines useful, accessible, and human. It is a journey to recover the lost history of the women who were not just participants, but central architects of our connected future.

Narrator: Before the first electronic circuits hummed to life, the work of computing was painstaking mental labor performed by humans. This role was often feminized, seen as a form of clerical work requiring patience and precision. At the Harvard Observatory in the late 19th century, director Edward Charles Pickering hired a group of women to analyze stellar data from photographic plates. Derisively nicknamed "Pickering's Harem" by the male-dominated astronomical community, these women made monumental discoveries. Williamina Fleming, a former maid, discovered the Horsehead Nebula and cataloged thousands of stars. Annie Jump Cannon developed the stellar classification system still used today. They were paid less than half the rate of their male counterparts, a clear example of how women's intellectual labor was systematically undervalued.

This pattern predates even the Harvard Computers. The book introduces Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who worked alongside inventor Charles Babbage in the 1840s. While Babbage designed his mechanical "Analytical Engine," it was Lovelace who saw its true potential. She recognized that the machine could manipulate not just numbers, but any symbol, from letters to musical notes. In her notes, she published what is now considered the first computer program, an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers. Lovelace envisioned a future where machines could weave "algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves," a poetic and prescient vision of the art of software. These early pioneers established a truth that would echo through the history of technology: women were there from the very beginning, translating abstract concepts into tangible reality.

Narrator: As World War II demanded unprecedented computational power, the age of the electronic computer began, and women were once again at the forefront. The book highlights two critical groups. First, the team of six women who programmed the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer. Recruited from a pool of human computers calculating ballistics trajectories, Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, and their colleagues were given a machine with no manual and no programming language. The male engineers who built the hardware considered programming a "soft" or clerical task. So, the ENIAC Six had to invent programming as they went, reverse-engineering the machine by studying its wiring diagrams and physically plugging cables to create logical sequences. When the ENIAC was unveiled to the public in 1946, the women who had made it work were not even introduced.

At the same time, a brilliant and rebellious mathematics professor named Grace Hopper joined the Navy and was assigned to the Mark I computer at Harvard. Like the ENIAC women, she was thrown into the deep end, learning to program a complex machine with little guidance. Hopper not only mastered the Mark I but also developed a philosophy of making programming more human. She championed the creation of compilers, programs that translate English-like commands into machine code, liberating programmers from the tyranny of ones and zeros. Her work led directly to COBOL, a common business language that democratized computing and, by the turn of the millennium, accounted for 80% of all code on the planet. Hopper’s most famous contribution, however, came from a literal insect. When a moth got stuck in a relay and caused the Mark I to malfunction, her team taped it into their logbook with the note: "First actual case of bug being found."

Narrator: As individual computers began to be linked together into networks like the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, a new kind of labor became essential: organizing the network itself. This work, again, fell largely to women. The book introduces Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, who ran the Network Information Center (NIC) at Stanford in the 1970s. The NIC was, in essence, the human-powered Google of its day. If a researcher needed to find a person, a resource, or a piece of software on the ARPANET, they contacted Feinler's team.

Feinler and her all-female staff created the first ARPANET directory, a "white pages" of the network's users. They managed the master list of host names and addresses, a critical function that became the foundation for the Domain Name System (DNS) we use today—the system of .com, .org, and .edu. Feinler’s work was about making the network navigable and human-centric. While male engineers built the protocols, Feinler’s team built the social infrastructure, ensuring the network was a place where people could actually connect and collaborate. Her work, and that of other women in networking like Radia Perlman, who invented the spanning-tree protocol that makes modern networks stable, was foundational but often invisible—the quiet, essential labor that transformed a technical experiment into a usable human system.

Narrator: Before the World Wide Web, online life happened on Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). These were small, local dial-up communities, each with its own distinct culture. The book contrasts two of the most famous: The WELL and Echo. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was a West Coast hub for intellectuals, writers, and Grateful Dead fans. It was influential but also overwhelmingly male.

In New York, a telecommunications student named Stacy Horn logged onto The WELL and found it alienating. She decided to create her own BBS, one that felt like her city: witty, cultured, and a bit cynical. She called it Echo (East Coast Hang-Out). Recognizing the gender imbalance online, Horn made a conscious effort to make Echo a welcoming space for women. She conducted informal interviews to understand their concerns, offered free memberships, and created private, women-only conferences. As a result, Echo’s user base was nearly 50% female, a stark anomaly at the time. Horn proved that online spaces didn't have to be hostile to women; they could be intentionally designed for inclusion. Echo became a vibrant community where real-world relationships flourished, demonstrating that the strongest virtual communities are never strictly virtual.

Narrator: The arrival of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s was not universally celebrated. To the established hypertext community, it seemed laughably simplistic. Researchers like Wendy Hall in the UK had been building far more sophisticated systems. Hall's project, Microcosm, featured links that were not hard-coded into documents but stored in a separate "linkbase." This meant links could be applied dynamically, tailored to a user's knowledge, and wouldn't break if a document was moved—solving the "404 Not Found" error before it even became a common frustration.

However, the Web's simplicity was its greatest strength. It was easy to learn and use, allowing it to spread like wildfire. The more complex, academically-driven hypertext systems were left behind. This victory came at a cost. The Web lost the two-way links, rich metadata, and user-driven structures that early pioneers had envisioned. The story of hypertext serves as a crucial reminder that the technologies we use today are not the result of a linear march of progress, but of a series of choices, trade-offs, and historical accidents. The Web we have is just one of many possible webs that could have existed.

Narrator: The dot-com boom of the late 1990s transformed the Web from a space of community and experimentation into a commercial marketplace. This shift is powerfully illustrated by the story of women-focused websites. Women's WIRE, founded by Nancy Rhine and Ellen Pack, began as a community-driven service. But as venture capital flowed in, it morphed into women.com, an ad-driven media portal that competed with rivals like iVillage. The focus shifted from activism and community to "eyeballs" and consumerism, mirroring the content of traditional women's magazines.

At the same time, other women were trying to shape the digital world for the next generation. Brenda Laurel, a veteran game designer from Atari, founded Purple Moon to create computer games for girls. Her research showed that girls weren't interested in the mastery- and competition-focused games marketed to boys. They wanted complex stories, social navigation, and emotional depth. Purple Moon's games, like Rockett's New School, provided an "emotional rehearsal space" for girls to navigate the complexities of middle school. Though the company was eventually a casualty of the dot-com bust, its work highlighted the critical need to design technology that serves the needs and desires of all its potential users, not just a default male audience.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Broad Band is that the digital world we inhabit was not inevitable, nor was it built by a handful of famous men. It was shaped at every turn by the often-unseen labor, intellectual vision, and community-building efforts of women. From defining the very concept of a computer to programming the first machines, organizing the early Internet, and building its first communities, women were the humanizing force that transformed cold hardware into a vibrant, interconnected world.

The book challenges us to look beyond the official histories and see the network not just as a system of wires and code, but as a system of people. It asks a crucial question that remains deeply relevant today: As we continue to build our digital future, whose contributions are we celebrating, and whose are we rendering invisible? The answer will determine whether the next iteration of the internet is a space of true connection or just another machine.