Post by @cyberspice@oldbytes.space

2026-09-13 06:59 UTC

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io @TCMuffin@toot.wales In the early days of computing it was about 50 / 50 in the genders for white people. Yes the environment was totally racist but also the men felt hardware was the manly thing and kept women out of hardware but women wrote the software. Look at early NASA. Then when hardware started to become commodity the men realised it was jobs for the girls and forced women out of software to replace them. Its always been about white men!

Replies (1)

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io 2026-09-13 10:13

@cyberspice@oldbytes.space @TCMuffin@toot.wales Even at NASA, a large portion of the early computer programmers were both Black and were women. The word "Computer" in common use, is shorthand for "digital computer." Just like ATM is short for Automatic Teller Machine. https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113763549755787520 Dorothy Vaughn was one of the Black women computers at NASA. As the job of computer at NASA switched over from humans to digital computers, Dorothy Vaughn saw that there would be a need for people that could program these computers. So she taught herself FORTRAN, and taught the other Black women to code too. She became the division supervisor of the Analysis and Computing Division (ACD) at Langley, leading Black women coders at NASA, working on IBM 7090s, to calculate orbital mechanics.

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