started:sept 8 finished: sept 23
I had a purpose when I started reading this book. My hyperfixation on the internet and coding and computers has reached its peak and I needed a good overview of the history of computing. I went for a womens history of computing first. this is a great book. a great starter/intro into the development of computers with an eye towards all the woman that pushed the technology further. A lot of this review will be me just writing about parts of the book/sharing quotes and ideas I liked. This is entirely self indulgent I cant lie. and i also needed a place to keep all these before I return the book to the library lol. so here it goes
first, I was in love with the history of the term BUG. It dates to at least the 1800s with Thomas Edison using the word to refer to mechanical glitches.
I also found it interesting how computing ended up in the hands of women at first. when discussing the contruction on the ENIAC,Evans writes about how women got put on the job without a ton of thought about it. She writes "it seemed only natural that the human computers should train their replacements" but what i thought was really interesting was that she claims this comes from the ENIAC also looking like a telephone switchboard which reinforced the assumption that its operation should be by women. the task of operating the machine was characterized as "more handicraft than science, more feminine than masculine, more mechanical than intellectual". There are a ton of relations of computing and programming to fiber arts and crafts. Evans mentions Sadie Plant who wrote about computing and its relationship to looms (Sadie Plant's book is next on my list lol)As someone who loves both fiber arts and technology this connection was really enlightening.
One of the other things I loved reading about was the tactile connections these women had with the machines they worked with. They were physically inside the machines, manipulating them from the inside. They knew these machines so intimately.
I am not a regular gamer so I know very little of gaming history. There is a section of the book on the game Colossal Cave Adventures that was fascinating to me. It is also a really touching story of a man who loved a women and a woman who made an amazing discovery. It made me really want to play the game.
at one point in the book, Evans talks about websites and domain names. There are different categories, .mil for military hosts, .gov, .org, and so on. .com is for commercial entities. Evans writes "that we use this domain most of all today should say something about what the network has become". This stood out to me. I do think it is sad to think about how much of our presence online is jumping from one .com to another. this is part of the reason i got into the web revival movement.
Another cool thing was Jamie Levy's electronic magazines. these were magazines on floppy disk! they have the vibe of zines.
