Good morning,

Here are some links about women who did awesome and innovative things with computers and the culture around them. Enjoy!

We start with the interesting and not entirely happy story of Joan Ball, the woman who was the first to create a computer dating program. She also – and this is the more interesting bit to me – found a better way of matching people even before then, finding that what people say they don’t want is much more important than what they say they want. I’d never thought of the latter as having a lot more flex than the former, but it makes sense:

She needed help bringing people together in a logical way, at a large scale, so that they could go off and do illogical things at a small scale. She needed to balance the personal and the impersonal, the rational and the romantic, in order to make it work. So she started asking people to write down what they didn't want—this time in a more rigid format that could be quantified. The rest, after all, remained negotiable. Despite the idea that computer dating was somehow “revolutionary” or only for the young, it was divorcees, widowers, and older unmarried people who mostly answered her call.

https://logicmag.io/02-the-mother-of-all-swipes/

You know how I love to feature obituaries in Fem Fri, and this is a good one – Mary Berners-Lee, who made an unfair system work for her and other women to such a massive extent that it feels like a challenge:

The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world’s first freelance programmers.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/23/mary-lee-berners-lee-obituary

Finally, it’s quite likely that you’ve seen this tweet, but it’s relevant to this episode and I’m not bored of it yet:

https://twitter.com/abolibibelot/status/955382252304830464

Tap tap tap tap tap,

Alex.