Broad Band

The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

By: Claire L. Evans

Narrated by: Claire L. Evans

If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet--written out of history, until now.

"This is a radically important, timely work," says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation.

In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story.

VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today.

Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s.

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore.

Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.

Should be required reading

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. So many rich stories of the women pioneers of Tech.

Similar to Hidden Figures

The womens' contributions inspired me to see beyond cultural stereotypes.
I also enjoyed relating to the nuance in each story. None were "perfect" & that left room for something to be built upon by future contributors.

A MUST Read for Women of the Computer Age...

A MUST Read for Women of the Computer Age... and their daughters... and their mothers. If you liked "Hidden Figures", you'll love this!

Inspiring

This is an interesting book about the history of women coders, engineers, mathematicians, entrepreneurs as well as visionaries who helped create and shape the internet. Evans even discusses Ada Lovelace, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron.

The book is well written and researched. Evans is a journalist so the writing style is that of a journalist. Evans reviews the stories of women scientists such as the famous Grace Hopper, who worked on Harvard Mark One, to more recent women such as Stanford University scientist Elizabeth Feinler. She also includes programmer Brenda Laurel, a gamer entrepreneur. I found the story about Radia Perlman most interesting. Perlman invented a protocol for moving information to the way computers are networked. I had no idea so many women have achieved so much with so little recognition. I highly recommend this book.

The book is nine hours. The author narrated the book.

Wonderful history full of surprises

Poetic language and well-told stories yield numerous affecting and interesting insights about how the history of computers and the internet shapes our world today. Wonderful work of history accessibly preserving important stories about the women who led the exploration of the tech that dominates our lives today.