Womens Month 2023 Article

August is Mzansi’s women’s month. On 9 August 1956, 20 000 South African women from all walks of life broke the apartheid barriers and marched to the Union Buildings to protest the pass laws. 9th August, Women’s Day is a public holiday in South Africa, commemorating the March led by Lillian Masediba Ngoyi, Sophia Williams de Bruyn, Rahima Moosa, Albertina Sisulu and Helen Joseph.

As a digital dinosaur residing in Mzansi would like to celebrate women’s month by celebrating some of the most important women in Information and Communication Technology. Let us give thanks to the following women for the role they have played in our sector:

• Ada Lovelace (born Augusta Ada Byron; December 10, 1815- November 27, 1852) was an English mathematician who has been called the first computer programmer for writing an algorithm, or a set of operating instructions, for the early computing machine built by Charles Babbage in 1821. Considered as the “Prophet of the Computer Age”.

• Grace Brewster Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She has been called the “queen of code” and “mother of computing.” In 1952, she invented a compiler that translated English into computer code.

• Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, B.V.M. (December 17, 1913 – January 10, 1985) was an American Roman Catholic religious sister, educator, and pioneer in computer science. She was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the United States. She teamed up with 2 other scientists to develop the BASIC computer programming language.

• Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American actress and inventor. Hedy’s greatest invention was her Secret Communication System, a frequency hopping device which became the basis for many modern-day inventions, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

• Elizabeth Feinler (born March 2, 1931 (92 years))” is an American information scientist. From 1972 until 1989 she was director of the Network Information Systems Center at the Stanford Research Institute for the ARPANET as it evolved into the Defense Data Network and the Internet. She is the one to thank for the dot coms, dot nets, dot govs used daily.

• Annie Easly (April 23, 1933 – June 25, 2011) is an American information scientist who became a programmer. She developed and implemented the code that led to the development of batteries used in hybrid cars. Her contributions to developing the project’s rocket stage software laid the technological foundation for future space launches.

• Stephanie Shirley (born 16 September 1933 (age 89 years) is a German-born (naturalised British in 1951). She founded a work-from-home contract programming company in 1962 exclusively for women called “Freelance Programmers” that eventually employed over 8,500 people. The company grew rapidly and went public in 1996. Ultimately, her company was valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members.

• Margaret Elaine Hamilton (born 1936 (age 86 years), is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She invented the term “software engineering.

• Mary Allen Wilkes (born September 25, 1937) is a lawyer, former computer programmer and logic designer, known for her 1961 work with the LINC computer, now recognised by many as the world’s first “personal computer”. She designed and wrote the system software as well as the interactive operating system.

• Adele Goldberg (born July 22, 1945) is an American computer scientist. She was the only woman among the group of men who built the Smalltalk-80 programming language, used to create one of the first modern Graphics User Interface (GUI) featuring windows, icons, menus, and pointers (WIMP).

• Radia Perlman (born July 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. In 1985, Perlman’s supervisor at Digital Equipment Corporation appointed her to find a solution that would give computers the ability to share data more reliably. She is a major figure in assembling the networks to enable what we know as the internet.

• Fei-Fei Li (born 1976 (age 47 years), Beijing, China) is an American computer scientist. She is the inventor of ImageNet, a database of over 15 million images, which has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI as the database helped “train” the first computer to recognise and understand what’s in a picture.