The original ENIAC programming team was all women. The person who popularized the term "bug" was Grace Hopper, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer among other things.
The original ENIAC programming team was all women. The person who popularized the term "bug" was Grace Hopper, one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer among other things.
Basically, women had major roles in early programming, until most were systematically reduced to mere computers.
The term bug stands for literal bugs, as in insects that got fried and destroyed the hardware. If you have looked at the link you posted you would see that the term bug is older than her. The source dates it as older than 1878. It still doesn't change that programming is not giving computers the input they need to function, as even in the most primitive language there is in programming, that is just activating the the right gates on the chip, the programming is in thinking about how the algorithm works and not how to type it in. I am not saying woman haven't programmed stuff, I am saying that programming is not typing stuff into computers.
And if you look at the very line you quoted, it said "popularized", not "originated".
Here is the wiki quote about bugs "The term "bug" to describe defects has been a part of engineering jargon since the 1870s and predates electronic computers and computer software; it may have originally been used in hardware engineering to describe mechanical malfunctions. For instance, Thomas Edison wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878:It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.[3]" So she did not popularize or invent the term, she used it.
Ahem:
Edison wasn't a computer programmer.
Yes and? the term comes from engineering, the first computers where build by engineeres, so the terms are used because they are also used in electrical and other engineering.
I'm not saying she is not a programmer, I'm saying she did not invent or popularize the term bug, she also did not found this specific bug as seen here Software bug - Wikipedia . And I also say that some people here have really strange conceptions of what programming is, if they say it is secreterial, as it was maths from the beginning, with the first algorithm being written by a female mathematican.
And also this:
Between 30 and 50 percent of programmers were women in the 1950s, and it was seen as a natural career for them, as evidenced by a 1967 Cosmopolitan feature about "Computer Girls."
You can find source after source after source that will confirm that women were pioneers in computing due to the initial and precursor work being seen as secretarial and feminine, but once it became profitable the Old Boy's Clubs worked around the clock to retcon it into "sweaty antisocial nerds", male work even if it isn't masculine work. And look at where the last part hits, let's check out that link:
Interesting. This argues that the 1983 crash is responsible for the shift. Or more accurately its an excuse. The 1983 crash was caused by a total lack of quality control, which companies like Nintendo recovered from by establishing distinct brands distinguishing themselves from shovelware, and had nothing to do with gender. But the crash provides a perfect opportunity to hem and haw and come to the conclusion that you need to pander harder to people who look like yourself (since by this point women had been driven out of computing) which is always a pleasing conclusion. Kind of like how when a recession happens rich people conclude "we need to tighten our belts" where by "we" they mean "everyone but us". Never let a good crisis go to waste.
I am reminded of the article Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test
Which illustrates a non-gender example of the same, then muses on why it happens given that businesses are supposedly fanatically fixated on profit to the exclusion of everything else, and argues its a mixture of ego (make the world revolve around people like me), laziness (changing that attitude would take effort, of course what I like is best), and pride (acknowledging the need for change would mean admitting that you are currently being bigoted and wrong, and have doubled down on your wrong position over and over even as it becomes increasingly untenable). Its easy to generate confirmation bias to feed that. I imagine that a lot of focus groups on videogames were organized by white men and recruited white men as subjects because 'obviously' they're the target audience, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So they had the numbers showing that games played mainly by girls were the true bestsellers and decided to bury this so they could get back to talking about manly games doing manly things. This explains a lot of how you can look through gaming magazines and conclude gaming was of, by, and for guys, even when women were a constant and substantive presence in the gaming community from day one. Typical.
Of course they would, logically there would be more games with female protagonists if the games industry was spared from the decades of being an all boys club.
