Women in Computing - Timeline of Women in Computing

Timeline of Women in Computing

• 1842: Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), was an analyst of Charles Babbage's analytical engine and is often described as the "first computer programmer."
• 1893: Henrietta Swan Leavitt joined the Harvard "computers", a group of women engaged in the production of astronomical data at Harvard. She was instrumental in discovery of the cepheid variable stars, which are evidence for the expansion of the universe.
• 1926: Grete Hermann published the foundational paper for computerized algebra. It was her doctoral thesis, titled "The Question of Finitely Many Steps in Polynomial Ideal Theory", and published in Mathematische Annalen.
• 1940s: American women were recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers during WWII. Around 1943-1945, these women "computers" used a Differential Analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to speed up their calculations, though the machine required a mechanic to be totally accurate and the women often rechecked the calculations by hand.
• 1942: Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000), was an actress and the co-inventor of an early form of spread-spectrum broadcasting.
• 1943: Women worked as WREN Colossus operators during WW2 at Bletchley Park.
• 1943: The wives of scientists at Los Alamos were first organized as "computers" on the Manhattan Project.
• 1946: Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman were the original programmers of the ENIAC.
• 1949: Grace Hopper (1906–1992), was a United States Navy officer and the first programmer of the Harvard Mark I, known as the "Mother of COBOL". She developed the first ever compiler for an electronic computer, known as A-0.
• 1958: Orbital calculations for the United States' Explorer 1 satellite were solved by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's all-female "computers", many of whom were recruited out of high school.
  Mechanical calculators were supplemented with logarithmic calculations performed by hand.
• 1961: Dana Ulery (1938-), was the first female engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing real-time tracking systems using a North American Aviation Recomp II, a 40-bit word size computer.
• 1962: Jean E. Sammet (1928-), developed the FORMAC programming language. She was also the first to write extensively about the history and categorisation of programming languages in 1969,
  and became the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1974.
• 1965: Mary Allen Wilkes was the first person to use a computer in a private home (in 1965) and the first developer of an operating system (LAP) for the first minicomputer (LINC).
• 1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller (1914? - 1985) became the first American woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science in 1965. Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns."
• 1970?: Susan Nycum did early computer security and computer law/intellectual property for Datamation.
• 1972: Adele Goldberg (1945-), was one of the designers and developers of the Smalltalk language.
• 1972: Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), was a pioneer of information retrieval and natural language processing.
• 1972: Sandy Kurtzig founded ASK Computer Systems, an early Silicon Valley startup.
• 1973: Lynn Conway (1938-), led the "LSI Systems" group, and co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems.
• 1975?: Phyllis Fox worked on the PORT portable mathematical/numerical library.
• 1978: Sophie Wilson (?), designed the Acorn Microcomputer.
• 1978: The Association for Women in Computing was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1978.
• 1979: Carol Shaw (?), was a game designer and programmer for Atari Corp. and Activision.
• 1980: Carla Meninsky (?), was the game designer and programmer for Atari 2600 games Dodge 'Em and Warlords.
• 1982?: Lorinda Cherry worked on the Writers WorkBench (wwb) for Bell Labs.
• 1983: Janese Swanson (with others) developed the first of the Carmen Sandiego games. She went on to found Girl Tech.
• 1984: Roberta Williams (1953-), did pioneering work in graphical adventure games for personal computers, particularly the King's Quest series.
• 1984: Susan Kare (1954-), created the icons and many of the interface elements for the original Apple Macintosh in the 1980s, and was an original employee of NeXT, working as the Creative Director.
• 1985: Radia Perlman (1951-), invented the Spanning Tree Protocol. She has done extensive and innovative research, particularly on encryption and networking. She received the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, among numerous others.
• 1985: Irma Wyman (~1927-), was the first Honeywell CIO.
• 1986: Hannah Smith was the "Girlie tipster" for CRASH (magazine).
• 1988: Éva Tardos (1957-), was the recipient of the Fulkerson Prize for her research on design and analysis of algorithms.
• 1989: Frances E. Allen (1932-), became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989. In 2006 she became the first female recipient of the ACM's Turing Award.
• 1992: A photograph of the all-female parody pop group Les Horribles Cernettes appears on the recently created World Wide Web, the first photo there according to media reports.
• 1993: Shafi Goldwasser (1958-), a theoretical computer scientist, is a two-time recipient of the Gödel Prize for research on complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory, and the invention of zero-knowledge proofs.
• 1993: Barbara Liskov, together with Jeannette Wing, developed the Liskov substitution principle. Liskov was also the winner of the Turing Prize in 2008.
• 1994: Sally Floyd (~1953-), is most renowned for her work on Transmission Control Protocol.
• 1996: Xiaoyuan Tu (1967-), was the first female recipient of the ACM's Doctoral Dissertation Award.
• 1997: Anita Borg (1949–2003), was the founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT).
• 1999: Marissa Mayer (1975-), was the first female engineer hired at Google, and was later named Vice President of Search Product and User Experience. She is currently the CEO of Yahoo.
• 2001: Audrey Tang (1981-), was the initiator and leader of the Pugs project.
• 2003: Ellen Spertus earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1998 with the notable thesis "ParaSite: Mining the structural information on the World-Wide Web."
• 2004: Jeri Ellsworth (1974-), was a self-taught computer chip designer and creator of the C64 Direct-to-TV.
• 2005: Mary Lou Jepsen (1965-), was the founder and chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and the founder of Pixel Qi.
• 2005: Ruchi Sanghvi became the first female engineer at Facebook.
• 2006: Maria Klawe (1951-), was the first woman to become President of Harvey Mudd College since its founding in 1955 and was ACM president from 2002 until 2004.
• 2012: Marissa Mayer (1975-), becomes CEO of Yahoo!