Sometimes I have problems categorizing articles I discuss. Perhaps this item would have fit in “women & technology”, but I don’t think this is exclusively a “woman’s problem”. Since I’ve seen this since the days of Unix and experienced the brunt of it during the pioneering days of open source and 386BSD, I think it may belong in a broader category than that peddled by the vanishing newspapers.
Month: March 2007
Fun Friday: Turing Goes Pink
Well, it finally happened. The Turing award went to a woman. Frances Allen, IBM Fellow, began her career teaching FORTRAN in 1957 (the year of Sputnik) at a time when nobody really knew what to do with those big clunky room-sized computers and “computer science” didn’t exist as a discipline. By the end of her career, she had worked on parallel computing and high performance computing initiatives such as PTRAN, and also become a mentor to many younger scientists. An honorable career.