Fem Tech
Background of Fem Tech and motivation
Women's scholarly References
Quotes
In her article "Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks", Wendy Chun (2011) traces some of the background of gendered software and computer system as follow:
"The term soft , as this book elaborates, is gendered. Grace Murray Hopper claims that the term software was introduced to describe compilers, which she initially called “ layettes ” for computers; J. Chuan Chu, one of the hardware engineers for the ENIAC, the fi rst working electronic digital computer, called software the “ daughter ” of Fran- kenstein (hardware being the son). 13” "
"At first, software encompassed everything that was not hardware, such as services. "This conflation of instruction with result stems in part from software ’ s and comput- ing ’ s gendered, military history: in the military there is supposed to be no difference between a command given and a command completed — especially to a computer that is a “ girl. ” For computers, during World War II, were in fact young women with some background in mathematics. Not only were women available for work during that era, they also were considered to be better, more conscientious computers, presumably because they were better at repetitious, clerical tasks. They were also undifferentiated: they were all unnamed “ computers, ” regardless of their mathematical training. 46
These computers produced ballistics tables for new weapons, tables designed to control ser- vicemen ’ s battlefi eld actions. Rather than aiming and shooting, servicemen were to set their guns to the proper values (not surprisingly, these tables and gun governors were often ignored or ditched by servicemen). 47 The women who became the “ ENIAC girls ” (later the more politically correct “ women of the ENIAC ” ) — Kathleen/Kay McNulty (Mauchly Antonelli), Jean Jennings (Bartik), Frances Snyder (Holberton), Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer), Frances Bilas (Spence), and Ruth Lichterman (Teitelbaum) (married names in parentheses) — were computers who volunteered to work on a secret project (when they learned they would be operat- ing a machine, they had to be reassured that they had not been demoted). Program- mers were former computers because they were best suited to prepare their successors: they thought and acted like computers. One could say that programming became programming and software became software when the command structure shifted from commanding a “ girl ” to commanding a machine. Kay Mauchly Antonelli described the “ evolution ” of computing as moving from female computers using Marchant machines to fi ll in fourteen-column sheets (which took forty hours to com- plete the job), to using differential analyzers (fifteen minutes to do the job), to using the ENIAC (seconds).
Feminist technology projects
Issues
- No single woman artist was mentioned [1]