It’s kind of disappointing to me that this article will generate a lot of discussion, because it’s actually a pretty shallow retelling of the folklore that doesn’t really add anything to the discussion. I’d love a deeper dive into what exactly happened during this time period, but I think a lot of the discussion up to this point has failed to provide adequate context, sources, or even just anecdotes to help paint the picture.

I also want to understand what the discipline of programming even was “prior to the 1960s and 1970s.” I don’t have a concept for it, but I can only imagine it is largely foreign to me. Is there any lasting artifacts of this era of programming? I suspect that the rapid evolution of the discipline probably caused it to go through more demographic shifts than just this one, too.

I find reading about the history of computer science fascinating. Stuff like folklore.org is great. I would really like that kind of dive into this era, even if maybe it was less glorified. Certainly there had to be some interesting anecdotes…

Unfortunately, all we ever get is this same story, which all we can really do is take at face value. I get that the point of this is to be a story about gender (in)equality, but reducing it to just that is a bit disappointing, and it’s unclear what we can learn from it, other than “it’s bad that this happened!”