Broad Band

Broad Band by Claire L. Evans is subtitled The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and attempts to tell just that tale.  The book sounded interesting and since my own mother had spent her life working as a programmer I was interested.  Unfortunately the book did not deliver what I would have liked.  It started off well telling the tale of the theoretical origins of computers in the work of Babbage and Lovelace and continued well with the story of the development of computers through the early WWII and post WWII years.  Then the author lost me and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why.  I think it might be because she chose to focus in detail on a few specific women in a way that left me with the belief that the untold history of the women who made the Internet is that they were sidetracked from the main lines of thought and preoccupied with just exactly those aspects of the phenomena that are ghettoized as feminine. 

I was ultimately disappointed because I know women have played a big role in computers, computer programming, and the development and growth of the Internet but I would be unable to use this book to justify my belief to a skeptic.  In the final analysis I would say pick up this book for the parts through the 1950’s and stop reading after that.