Book Review: Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

My brother, a software?* engineer, and sister-in-law bought me this book for my birthday, correctly guessing it would interest me. I was excited to receive it and then (all together now!) it sat on the shelf for several years. I decided to read it for Women's History Month. Summary below: 

The history of the internet is more than just alpha nerds, brogrammers, and male garage-to-riches billionaires. 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.

In a world where tech companies are still male-dominated and women are often dissuaded from STEM careers, Broad Band shines a much-needed light on the bright minds history forgot, from pioneering database poets, data wranglers, and hypertext dreamers to glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs.

Get to know Ada Lovelace, who wove the first computer program in 1842, and Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, the New York cyberpunk who ran one of the world's earliest social networks out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s.

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become leaders of the tech revolution. This electrifying corrective to tech history introduces us all to our long-overlooked tech mothers and grandmothers—showing us that if there's a "boy's club" that dominates Silicon Valley today, it's an anachronism.

The title is a pun - broadband and broad (early/mid-twentieth century slang for woman) band. A band of women gave us broadband. Sort of. They made the internet possible anyway. Claire L. Evans takes us through a brisk tour of of women's contributions to computer science and the World Wide Web/Internet (yes, those are two different things. No, I can't really explain it to you). She starts with Ada Lovelace and female computers (if you've seen Hidden Figures then you get it), going on to Grace Hopper and other awesome ladies programming and debugging computers etc. Then she goes on through the decades to talk about other awesome tech women, none of whom I had heard about. An English woman came up with working hypertext like a decade before Tim Berners-Lee did, but used a different format of internet. It's all such fascinating stuff. The internet makes perfect sense to me: stuff links to other stuff. But early tech and internet connections? Holy shit. How did they do that?!?!?

Evans covers all of this in an engaging way, neither too scientific or casual/chatty. As a journalist, Evans (who interviewed just about all of these women personally) is great at telling the stories, yet she doesn't tell us enough. I am dying to know more about these women, but there are hardly any pictures or a suggested reading list (I guess that's not necessary but always appreciated). Stuff I didn't need to know about (Grace Hopper's drinking problem) was shared while other stuff I did want to know (some of these women must have been queer, right?) was not. There are endnotes, but no little numbers in the body of the text to indicate which citation or quotation goes to which endnote (I guess we're supposed to count quoted sentences in each chapter?), which I personally think is irresponsible in a nonfiction book. 

Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and want to learn more about the awesome women who gave us the internet/WWW, allowing me share my stupid little book reviews that no one reads anyway. Thanks for everything, ladies. 

Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: March 8-15
From: gift
Status: keep

Cover notes: I love the use of the motherboard (so punny) to make a lady figure, but I think the b00b parts are unnecessarily crass.

Trigger warnings for this book: sexism, institutional sexism, transphobia in the chapter about the 1980s social network, drug and alcohol use mentions, claustrophobic depictions of spelunking in caves

*my engineer brother does something on computers with coding that affects internet/app-seeming things. That is the best I can tell you. Software engineering sums it up as best as I understand it. It's all very tech-y.