farcastHER

Today is the first day of Women's History Month, and so I wanted to share some of the stories of the famous figures that made the world so many of us take for granted. To start things off, the creator the first programming language: Ada Lovelace, who designed a schema to represent a program for the Analytical Engine.

While some may disagree that it constitutes a programming language, no one can question another language, that became a major influence in the world of electronic computers: FLOW-MATIC, the ancestor to COBOL. Admiral Grace Hopper envisioned a world with programs written in English, to be easier to understand.

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

I'm not going to mince words with her: Margaret Hamilton, as lead developer on the Apollo flight software, helped put humanity on the moon.

And then there's Adele Goldberg, one of the co-developers of Smalltalk-80. If this oddly-named language sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Smalltalk is the ancestor to Objective-C, and thus the world of applications for Mac OS X and iOS.

The Internet is nothing without the flow of packets that makes it and Radia Perlman, the "Mother of the Internet", was responsible for the Spanning Tree Protocol that powered the first network bridges. I had the pleasure of meeting her many years ago and her criticisms of the worst of crypto resonate strongly with me.

And speaking of crypto, so much of us in this industry owe a debt to the incredible research of Shafi Goldwasser, touching every aspect of modern cryptosystems and artificial intelligence, including the intersection of the two areas of research.

Finally, a heroine I have sung praises of many times over: Lynn Conway. Her contributions are twofold: the first instance of superscalar computing, and the research and innovation in the space of VLSI which unlocked mass manufacturing of integrated circuits, making the world of modern computers possible.