Women Who Built the Future (and Got None of the Credit) | Chaos Lever

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Ned: You're familiar with the book Who Moved My Cheese?

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Chris: Unfortunately, yes.

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Ned: It's a profoundly stupid book, but it does nail one thing, which is that people are resistant to change. I thought it was that cheese is delicious. I mean, it's a close second. Specifically, Gorgonzola.

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Ned: I really like Gorgonzola. Recent discovery for me, so I'm happy about that.

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Chris: The Just because, generally speaking, you were scared of the number of syllables?

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Ned: It's hard to pronounce, and it's got blue ribbons through it, which... I know it's mold, and it's not mold that's going to hurt me, but still, Chris, it's mold.

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Chris: That should be their marketing slogan.

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Ned: Gorgonzola.

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Chris: It's mold.

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Ned: What was that movie with Robin Williams where it was all truth in advertising? Volvo, boxy but good.

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Chris: No, you lost me on this one.

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Ned: Oh, my God. What a movie reference. Listeners, if you recall this movie, you can let us know in the comments because I'm never going to remember. And I've already forgotten what we talk about.

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Chris: I'm pretty sure it was Bicentennial, man.

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Ned: Hello, Alleged Human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot, unlike the Centennial Man, which was, God, that was a depressing movie. I'm a real human person with feelings, not transistors, and I feel for Robin Williams. With me is Chris, who feels nothing because he's dead inside.

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Chris: Some would argue it's better that way.

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Ned: I've definitely seen Centennial Man, and I definitely remember it being very sad at the end.

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Chris: I think you're right, although if that is in fact the case, I would have blocked it out of my memory entirely. Therefore, I don't believe it was actually even a movie.

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Ned: I feel like that and AI both were equally sad at the end.

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Chris: Yeah, but AI was sad because AI is bad. Okay.

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Ned: I can't recall if Centennial Man was actually good or just depressing.

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Ned: It's no what dreams may come.

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Ned: I'll tell you that much.

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Chris: Do you want people to actually listen to this or is everybody just going to get curled up in the corner?

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Ned: It's shocking how many movies Robin Williams was in that are actually very sad.

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Chris: Yeah.

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Ned: Maybe that's a meta-commentary on him as a person.

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Chris: In retrospect, I feel like it was a bit of a message.

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Ned: Indeed. Let's not talk about Robin Williams anymore. What do you got?

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Chris: Oh, I appreciate that transition.

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Ned: Masterful, one might say.

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Chris: No, I thought we could spend some time not going over one specific topic, but more a survey of people. In this case, in particular, in honor of Women's History Month, which we missed. Oups. Go us.

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Ned: I will put that entirely on my shoulders for existing.

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Chris: As will I. Excellent. Once again, this is entirely Ned's fault. And this is curious because as a 10-time Microsoft MVP, he's actually one of the few among us that can actually tell time from the flat circle that it is. It's him, it's Bill Gates, it's the lead singer of OMG somehow, and basically like 10 other people.

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Ned: It's 275 degree o'clock.

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Chris: God bless you. All of this is to say March of 2025 was once again, Women's History Month. And to the surprise of absolutely everyone, it was actually declared as such by the Trump Whitehouse.

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Ned: Wow.

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Chris: But of course, he was an obnoxious and hateful tool about the whole thing. But we can save that for the podcast about politics or I guess the basic human decency and people who are so profoundly and Prouly Lacking It podcast. Side point, I really feel like we need to workshop that one. That's a lot. That's a mouthful of a name.

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Ned: Which is, I thought we had that podcast, and it was called, And Here's Another Thing.

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Chris: It's just the sound of one man screaming.

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Ned: Oh, good.

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Chris: Anyway, I thought it would be fun to take a quick historical trip through history. Yeah, this was obviously a first draft, wasn't it?

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Ned: I guess it was, Chris.

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Chris: Let's go ahead and power through and highlight some women who have made massively important contributions to the growth of technology.

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Ned: All right.

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Chris: In the interest of time and interest, I'm going to focus on some lesser known names.

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Ned: Okay.

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Chris: It is likely that many people are familiar with the big ones. Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage on the analytical engine in the early to mid-1800s, and is widely credited as being the first programmer, or Grace Hopper, pardon me, Admiral Grace Hopper, who in the 1940s shepherded computation into the military, coined the phrase bug as it relates to computeripsies, was a pioneer in programming and created a little thing you might I've heard of called cobalt. We actually did an episode on her like a million years ago. It might have been the previous iteration. I wonder if that's digupable. Maybe that's when we can pull sometime when we need to fill her.

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Ned: Yeah, that would be a good I would be down with that.

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Chris: And the final big name that we won't be talking about here, although the story is interesting enough to deserve its own whole episode, Ned, is Hedy Lamar. The famous 1940s actress who had a side hobby as a serious no-bullshit engineer.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: She developed the concept of frequency hopping, a concept that is crucial to secure communications as we know them and Wi-Fi, so no big deal.

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Ned: Yeah, just a little thing she did on the side.

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Chris: An interesting quote that I found that I thought was interesting. Man, that one I didn't even do on purpose.

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Ned: You're bat in a thousand, my friend.

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Chris: Quote, Hedy always felt that people didn't appreciate her for her intelligence, that her beauty got in the way, said Richard Rodes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who wrote biography about her, stating in plain language, a situation that I know for a fact more than a few women find themselves in, even in 2025. Yes.

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Ned: If you don't think that you've seen Hedy Lamar, you absolutely have. I don't think you could possibly avoid a picture of her.

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Chris: Well, I mean, come on, don't go too far. Save this for the episode you're going to write.

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Ned: Okay, all right. I'm getting riled up already. Okay.

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Chris: Category one. General topic, 1940s, The Women of Bletchley Park. Now, much of this we already discussed in our episode about the Enigma Machine, which was episode... Yes. But the breaking of codes by England's Bletchley Park was accomplished in large part due to the huge number of anonymous women who worked there. How many, you may ask? Estimates vary, but of the expected 10,000-ish people who we think worked there, 75% or so were women. Wow. That, if you're doing the math at home, is a lot. It's way more than half. Women got assigned to Bleschley from a couple of places, primarily from being enlisted in the WRNS, which was the Women's Royal Naval Service, referred to as the Wrens, because you can pronounce that one. The operation of the bombs that were used to decrypt enigma messages in particular required a lot of elbow grease and a lot of people. Women were pulled in as translators, as mathematicians, carrying serious degrees in math, in physics, in engineering. It's fair to say that the sexist norms of the time were relaxed due to the overwhelming number of men who were off to war. For more on that particular phenomenon, you can check out the American documentary, A League of Their Own.

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Chris: Fun fact about that one, it tells you a lot about the rules of baseball.

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Ned: Like there's no crying.

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Chris: That's a big one.

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Ned: Yeah, that's the one rule I actually know about baseball. Everything else is just nonsense.

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Chris: What's a balk? Stop crying. As we said in our Enigma episode, the The Solution of the Axis Codes is widely credited with shortening the war by something like two years. And 75% of that was female-powered. So that's not nothing. No. In that episode, Ned recommended a book called The Rose Code, and I will now second that recommendation because I read it, too.

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Ned: Yay.

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Chris: Actually, I can't remember. If I already seconded it, then I'm going to go ahead and thirded it.

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Ned: Yeah, that's how things work.

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Chris: Sure. If you want a historical fiction breakdown of what it was like to work at Bletchley, this is the place to go, at least from what I have read. And here's a fun fact. If you read that book, you should know that a lot of the main characters are based on real people. The end notes of the book break down who is who, where they came from, how they got the information. But if you want a CliffsNotes version, here we go. All right. Character named Asla Kendall is a lightly fictionalized version of Asla Benning, who was described as a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and hut for translator who was Prince Philip's longtime wartime Girlfriend. I thought for sure that was all fake.

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Ned: Yeah, that was, to me, the fakest reading through it. And yeah, I was very surprised to realize that it was based pretty closely on a real person.

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Chris: Beth Finch is a composite of two very real women. One is a nameless codebreaker who supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown after a love affair with a married colleague fell apart. And as a result, this woman was sent to an asylum in fear that she would divulge secret information in her broken state. Awesome.

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Ned: Yeah, I think it's important to stress here what heavy veil of secrecy everybody working at Bletchley Park was under. They were not allowed to discuss what they were doing at Bletchley Park with anybody and continued not to be able to discuss it for decades afterwards until, I forget what the act was, but an act was passed that allowed them to finally acknowledge that they worked at Bletchley Park and what they worked on.

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Chris: Right. The other character that contributed to the Beth character in the book was one, Mavis Lever. Again, a real person and one of Bletchley Park's crypto-analytical stars. Then Mabel Chert, oh, that is Mab to you, sir. Thank you very much, is entirely fictional, although she was created as a composite of many, many women who served as Bledchley Park's worker bees. Such women came from all walks of life, from shop girls to daughters of the aristocrats in England, and served as decoders, filers, machine operators, and many many, many other jobs. And fun thing about all of this is that many of the pieces of dialog in that book are pulled directly from real people's letters, diaries, and reminisces. So some of that stuff does sound like fake when you read it, but there are ways to pull direct quotes. Historical fiction really is the best fiction.

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Ned: Indeed.

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Chris: But anyway, this is not supposed to be a book review podcast. Let's move along.

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Ned: Not yet.

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Ned: As everyone knows, we're a movie review podcast.

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Chris: Oh, I can't wait to listen to you break down and cry when you finally do the net.

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Ned: Oh, God. You see, if you click on the little icon in the bottom right corner, it takes you to the dark way.

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Chris: This is Unix. I know this. Anyway, also happening in the 1940s on our side of the Atlantic were the, quote, unquote, Code Girls of the US Navy. Now, don't send me any angry emails, or at least not any more than normal. I did not name them. The US, as everybody knows, was not to be outdone by their British counterparts in the code-breaking game, nor in the employing thousands upon thousands of anonymous women to help break said codes game. The American Women's Volunteer Services, or AWVS, somehow unofficially called the Special Women's Auxiliary Navy Service, or SWANS, a acronym if I've ever heard one.

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Ned: Yes. Okay.

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Chris: Worked much in the same way as the Bledchley Park crowd. The US had their own share of enigma deciphering going around, specifically around the four coder enigma. These machines, funnily enough, were built by National Cash Register and operated by, you guessed it, large groups of women. There does appear to be a non-fiction book about this that goes into great in-depth about it called, fittingly, Code Girls: The Untold Story of American Women Codebreakers of World War II by one Liz Mundee. Unfortunately, I don't have any fun facts pulled from the endnotes of this one because I haven't read it yet. Also, if anybody has book recommendations about this time in history, I'm all ears. Moving on to some specific individuals. Let's look at the 1950s and and talk about one Annie easily. All through the development of computers, as we know them, there have been staffs of women doing calculations by hand. These were the original computers, humans who did calculations. They had a pen and paper, and they computed where the whole thing came from. Still with me?

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Ned: I'm still with you.

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Ned: They made use of machines. The tabulating machines that were used for the census in the late 1800s, it was mostly women doing the data collection and the processing using these machines. They were still the computers, but that's where actual machines started to be involved in the process.

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Chris: Right. Early on, even with that part helping, we'll air quotes that, this was still drudgery.

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Ned: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

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Chris: And was one of the reasons that machine versions, more advanced computers that could do these calculations, were invented in the first place. Many female pioneers in technology started out their careers as hands Control... How do you call that? A computer, but the old kind, the human kind.

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Ned: Operators?

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Chris: Yeah, there we go. No, not even.

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Ned: Before that. No, no, no, that's... Oh, words.

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Ned: Words are hard, Chris. Clarks?

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Chris: Annie Eastley, for example, started out her career as one of these types of human computers at a little group in the government that you might have heard of called NASA.

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Ned: Sounds familiar.

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Chris: She had been a recent transplant to the Birmingham Alabama area, and read an article about people doing this type of stuff. And in her own words, she was young, and it was, something she had a real interest in doing. This was 1955, and for complex mathematics, it was still faster to have a human do it with pen and paper. Remember, no generalized computers that could do this math at the time. It took a lot of effort to build a machine to do some of this work, and the emphasis was on the word sum. In Annie's own words, again, the machines could, quote, add, subtract, multiply, divide. That was pretty much what the machines could do. If we needed a logarithm or an exponential, we then pulled out the tables and did it. We look up the tables and then put it all in by hand or a square root, all those things. It gives you a real indication of where computers actually were in 1955.

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Ned: Yeah, this was before we invented generally programmable computers for the most part, and being able to load a program through punch cards and have it actually execute it. I think we were still doing most stuff through plug boards and switch panels.

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Chris: But this, of course, the '50s, this was only the beginning, and things progressed very quickly. Human computers, as we have discussed already, eventually did get replaced by machines, and when they did, Annie moved on with the technology. She became an excellent actual computer programmer, using languages like Fortran to support NASA's programs. If I know anything about the government, those programs are probably still running.

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Ned: Probably.

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Chris: She worked on a lot of initiatives with NASA, including alternative power technologies such as hybrid-type batteries. This work eventually developed into the batteries used in the first hybrid cars. So while she had nothing to do with the hideous design of the first generation of a Prius, she was instrumental in setting the stage for the batteries that made the Prius go. Okay, I know. Using the words Prius and go in the same sentence makes for a bit of a dissonance. As the old saying goes, the only time a Prius can hit 100 miles per hour if it falls off a cliff, but that's neither here nor there.

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Ned: Fair enough.

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Chris: If you hit the gas pedal on a Prius, it's still going to be here, not there. I'm going to stop. 1970s, Dr. Adele Goldberg. I think it's safe to say that the accessibility and functionality of the modern desktop computer, especially, is inextricably tied to the graphical user interface or GUI, or GUI if you're nasty.

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Ned: Oh, God, that's gross. No, Dan Jackson is.

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Chris: And one thing we know about the GUI is that it was invented by Apple. Sure. And invented by Apple, I mean that Steve Jobs stole the idea from the dumbest group of smart people in all of history.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center or Park. These fucking guys. Am I right? It's a whole show, possibly several shows by itself that we could do on Park.

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Ned: Pretty much everything, and I do not think this is an exaggeration, pretty much everything that jobs and Bill Gates took and made famous and caused them to become billionaires was actually pioneered first at Park by people who made not billions.

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Chris: No. All of the engineers at Park are sadly far too unknown and far too undercompensated for their contributions. And prominent among them is one Dr. Adele Goldberg. Now, unlike the groups I mentioned above, in the 1970s, Xerox Park was very much a boys club. For a long time, Goldberg was the only female among the researchers. Still, she was a bit of a rock star and had a significant amount of influence. She was on the team that devised the small talk programming languages, and also, probably more important to posterity, helped design the infrastructure and concepts around GUIs. The point of the GUI, from her perspective, was to make computing easier to understand. I think it's safe to say that the team at Park was successful in that particular effort. Considering I'm using a GUI right now, and so are you. Yes, exactly.

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Ned: It should also be noted that while the GUI is probably the most lasting development that she was a part of, at the time, she was very passionate about small talk.

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Chris: Not gabbing, mind you, the programming language. I just talked about it. I'm not familiar with small talk as a programming language. When you said small talk, I immediately thought of Apple talk and the horrors of networking with Apple devices in the 1980s and '90s.

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Ned: All right.

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Ned: Well, if the intro to this episode made people sad, you finally just nailed it down.

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Chris: I just nailed the coffin. Small talk, the language, had a major influence in programming, popularizing/normalizing the ideas around object-oriented programming. And this was something else that Steve Jobs stole and incorporated into the Macintosh. In the CBS documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, Goldberg had this to say about that particular incident. Steve Jobs, quote, demanded that his entire programming team get a demo of the small talk system, and I said, No way. I had a big argument with the Xerox executives telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink, and I said that I would only do it if I were ordered to because then, of course, it would be their responsibility, and that's what they did. Now, it should be noted, Steve Jobs was never shy about his various thefts and the fact that Xerox Park just flat out shit the bed on this. In that same documentary, Triumf of the Nerves, Triumf of the Nerves? Triumns of the Burbs, What are we doing here? What are you doing? I don't know. Steve Jobs himself said this, quote, Basically, they, meaning the park people, basically, they were top of your heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do.

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Chris: And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been a company 10 times its size. Could have been IBM, could have been Microsoft of the '90s. So say what you will about Steve Jobs. At least he was honest about where he got his ideas. One thing else I will say is that Steve Jobs was a fucking nut bar who used to soak his feet in toilet water at the office as a way to calm down. He would just sit on the back of the toilet and put his feet in the toilet bowl. That is a thousand % true, and even more % disgusting. So many more percents. There's a great- All of them. Series of behind the Bastards on Steve Jobs.

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Ned: I highly recommend it.

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Ned: So fast forwarding today.

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Ned: Since we're running short on time, let's do a teeny bit of a speed run.

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Chris: It would be impossible to name everyone that deserves more credit than they deserve, but a few shoutouts that I found in my research. Elizabeth Jake-Feindler, who helped introduce the domain name system. That's an important one. A little bit. Susan Kare, who helped refine the concept of GUI at Apple and also created some of the iconic Apple graphics that are still being used on keyboards and character sets today. And one Donna Dubinsky, who helped build and bring to market the first PDAs or portable digital assistance, which eventually became the concept of a smartphone. Indeed. To close things out with a more modern woman, let's highlight Megan Smith. This might be one that we also touched on ages and ages ago. She was a former Google vice President who was CTO for the White House under Obama. Significantly, she helped craft the Obama administration's position on net neutrality. A position, which we've spoken a lot about on this airwaves and has had a bit of a rocky road. Yes, indeed it has. Listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Obama was the first White House to have a CTO at all, which was a major acknowledgement of the fact that there was need for a CTO, believe it or not.

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Ned: There's a really good book, and I'll have to look up the title because I constantly forget it, that talks about the work that has been done within the government to improve its technology.

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Ned: A lot of those people are getting laid off right now, unfortunately. But there was a whole group inside of the government that was just tasked with improving and modernizing government systems.

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Ned: They were wildly successful, which means they were immediately laid off when Musk took over. So I will find the name of that book, and I'll include it in the show notes. Cool. Yeah. And it's written by a woman.

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Ned: Look at that. Full circle.

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Ned: Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch, fire up DNS, and look up the nearest GUI. You've earned it. That sentence didn't earn it, but you earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever or go to the website chaoslever.

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Ned: Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts in general. Tom Foulery. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

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Chris: What's important is we're all going crazy. Some of us less slowly than others.