Steve Shirley escaped the Holocaust as a child & went on to found one of the earliest software startups. The really impressive part? She employed women programmers who had been pushed out of the workforce after having kids, & allowed them flexible, family friendly, work from home jobs—in the 1960s!
I wrote about her and some of her company’s work in this chapter called “The Baby and the Black Box”: marhicks.com/writing/Hick...
Anne Moffatt's memoir, The IT Girl, details the story behind the photograph with the baby—where Moffatt, then Technical Lead at Shirley’s company, Freelance Programmers, programmed the black box flight recorder for the Concorde
Thank you ! Most of computer science is done with paper 📄 + ✏️ ! I never saw a photograph of DEK in front of a computer either. Or Dijkstra, or Wirth. So many women played an important role in IT. Numerous articles can be found, notably on acm.org dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Slide rule!
Oh, man, I hadn't noticed that! Of course!
The chairs and table are amazing too
I… would like a print of that.
Fantastic thread—thank you! (My late mother began programming in binary code on punch cards in the 1960s and ended her career being known as “the Legend” in her field of programming.)
That’s so cool😍
My mother was programming on punch cards for a bank in the 60s and ended her career in the 60s underpaid and overlooked. Getting pregnant was used as 8 months notice to them.
What a bummer😔 It really was—and often not even 8 mos. All the women I spoke to said they were expected to quit either upon marriage or, if pregnant, before “showing” (so about 6 months depending on the fashions at the time). Some actively hid their marriages and pregnancies to keep their jobs.
My mom too, for an insurance company.
Your Mom was amazing! I came up in programming before email or texting existed, but long after punch cards thank goodness!! Have you read Hidden Figures? The book is 100x better than the movie, one of my favorite books of all time!
The movie was surprisingly enjoyable as well
I loved it!! It was so good I just wished they'd have added more of the book, I so loved every bit of the writing, actng and directing!
I haven’t. Thank you for the rec!
Reminds me of the staged photos many career women of that era had to do with this kids to reassure the public its ok, she may be successful but she’s still a ‘good woman’ Men didn’t have to do the same photos
I never thought about this
Think about all the women who include in their ( short) bios, that in addition to being a nuclear physicist or senator, or some powerful or technical thing, they are also “ mom to Suzy and Tommy” or something like that. Pretty common in my experience.
This is so great. It reminds me of the stories Eleanor Dodson used to tell of working for Dorothy Hodgkinson (Nobel Laureate) when she was a young scientist and mother. Having someone in power able to agree to bend rules/conventions to allow women in STEM to continue was/is so important.
I love that photo! Adorable 😊
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Maybe @bookmarks.bluecanary.dev is the service you’re looking for ?
WFH !
Sweet photo - I could imagine my mother and sister in a scene like this back in that day
The cover of that is gorgeous!
The baby and the black box. What a title!
She has a couple of great TED talks, too!
Fascinating obit
Mar, thank you for this. I'd never heard of her. Because of your post, I've just read loads about her and ordered her book! Thank you!
It’s a really interesting memoir! If you’d like to read the chapter I wrote about her and some of her company’s work it’s here: marhicks.com/writing/Hick...
This is brilliant, thanks for sharing
Thank you!
My coworker in IT, Linda, was at the company when they first moved to computers. To decide who would program it they had a test, and Linda got the second best score. The man that got the best score got the job, but didn’t know how to type. Typing being “secretary work”.
They decided to give both of them the job, and Linda could type. She did amazing work and when he left the company she became the lead. She’s been in IT ever since, now she’s not only a gifted analyst but a reservoir of institutional knowledge. That generation of women pioneers are amazing.
My parents are both retired from long careers as computer programmers. Since my mom was a girl, they taught her to type in school, but my dad as far as I know is still a hunt-and-peck typist to this day.
Can we also talk about how amazing her blazer is in the photo? Iconic.
She was so stylish!
"She showed an aptitude for mathematics, but the girls’ high school she attended in the town of Oswestry DID NOT OFFER THE SUBJECT." [emphasis mine]
She attended Maths lessons at Oswestry Boys' High School. By the time I attended they did offer Maths! However I went to the Boys' High School to do Latin, as did other girls.
She was a hero of mine back in the day
@merryrobin.bsky.social
Such an amazing story, thank for sharing! I'd come across her because one of the many things she did was pioneer early railway computing in the UK, but hadn't appreciated how huge and varied her career was.
I confess, to my shame, that I'd never heard of her.
Same. I just ordered her book.
Yes, she was quite impressive : computerhistory.org/profile/dame... Video of her 2018 Fellow award is included here: computerhistory.org/blog/2018-ch... She was still quite lively!
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From the obit: In a 2015 TED Talk, Ms. Shirley said, “You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads — they’re flat on top from being patted patronizingly.”
So the anti Lean In?
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She was a heroine for me when I started working as a software engineer in the 1970s
She was already a legend when I was working in IT in the 70s/80s, but I hadn't known she was a Holocaust survivor. RIP
❤️🔥
she also slowly shifted it to being employee-owned despite people's reservations www.thetimes.com/business-mon...
i think about this a lot, how to enable stable part-time work in this industry via small shops with low overhead. employee-owned means you're not chained to quarterly profits or investor hype cycles
there are consulting firms but i think there's a place for this outside of consulting too, just building great products. maybe it's too difficult to run a sustainable business that way with so much competition in the market. i do know a couple experienced devs who'd totally be down for part-time
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