Introduction
Each computing technology carries within itself an archetechnology that comprises both how it functions in the present, and all the historical decisions that led to its current state. None of those decisions were certain or inevitable while computers were being developed. Below, I will explore two archetechnologies without which today’s computerized and networked world might not exist. Both depended heavily on the contributions of women working together and, occasionally, the persistence of one woman working by herself.
COBOL and the Mothers of Distributed Invention
The first archetechnology is COBOL, the COmmon Business Oriented Language, which is still the most-used programming language in the world. Government, military, bank and airport computers are still running COBOL programs that, in some cases, date back to the 1960's and 70's. COBOL's deeper importance, however, lies in its role as the first platform-independent programming language. Today's ubiquitous digital technologies depend on the existence of programming languages that run on different types of computer hardware. In the late 1950's, however, this was not the case, and competition between computer companies seemed to preclude it. In the end, the development and adoption of COBOL drew heavily on the experiences of Grace Hopper and her women colleagues, who realized the value of a universal and easily learned programming language.
Learn more about the development of COBOL
Resource One and its Descendants
The second archetechnology is the Resource One computer system. Resource One was the first project that made computers accesible to the general public. Although both women and men worked together on Resource One and its descendant systems, women computer experts and their concept of a people's system were the common threads that kept the project going. Resource One started out as a secondhand SDS 940 mainframe, that Pamela Hardt-English fundraised for, and purchased for the Project One commune in San Francisco. After restoring the system to working order, Pam handed it off in 1973 to Jude Milhon (later famous under her hacker handle ‘St. Jude’ who made it the central processing system for the Community Memory—the first real-time computer bulletin board system and the precursor to the non-military, non-academic Internet. Milhon, in turn, handed the system off to three of her commune-mates who turned it into the Bay Area Social Services Referral Directory, which remained in operation—though not on the original Resource One mainframe—until 2009.
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