Miss understanding
Sometimes the kids at BoingBoing -- one of the best blogs ever, and source of almost endless amusement and inspiration -- get just a wee bit carried away. After someone sent in a photograph labelled MISS COMPUTER 1973 of a middle-aged woman in a 1970s-era data center, BoingBoinger Xeni J. published it with the plaintive headline "Miss Computer 1973 -- Who is she?"
After a failed guess that the woman was COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper, another reader suggested :
My guess is it is not MISS Computer as in a beautiful woman, but M.I.S.S. Computer as in a form of Materials Inventory Support System. The photo is of the computer system and the woman just happens to be standing there.
Oh... never mind! But let's give credit to the site for allowing the original misunderstanding to remain visible along with the clarification -- because without the misattribution, none of it would make sense anyway.
I guess it's all just wishful thinking. The world of IT was incredibly male-dominated in the 1970s and it would have been a miracle if they'd designated a middle-aged female brainiac as "Miss Computer." If they had chosen a "Miss Computer" at all -- and there were women in CS departments, if not very many -- it probably would have been some undergrad babe. Where are their photos? I want to see the real CS co-eds of 1973!
1 comment:
There were women all over - few, but certainly there and visible. I had that job messing with McCoot's papers, and he was at MIT in the 50s and 60s and Stanford in the 70s. His papers had plenty of correspondence and references to women computer scientists and CS students. I always noticed their names, and noticed them in group photos of departments or "class of 62" shots or whatever. My ex-girlfriend's mom was on the team at IBM in the 60s that designed a particularly famous chip... And she wasn't the only one. So it would be a mistake to assume they were all THAT rare. And to find out who they were would be a matter of going into department records or asking some older profs...
Hmm, for all I know, McCoot would recognize the person in that photo.
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