Hi team,

How are you doing on this wet and windy May day. It's wet and windy in London at least, but I hope that you personally are warm and happy and looking forward to a newsletter of women doing cool stuff with computers. Thank you to the friend and subscriber who provided the inspiration for this one. Let's get going!

We start with this interview with Elizabeth Feinler, who was an early internet innovator! This is an great interview, really long and detailed, so if you've got a meeting you can zone out in coming up I'd bookmark it for then. If you're a colleague of mine who is reading this, I never zone out in the meetings you organise, but I read in a think piece that it's something people do sometimes:

I read […] about a group being created at SRI that paired information specialists, in my case chemistry, with research teams. The specialists searched the technical literature, then gathered, and organized the information pertinent to the research team’s needs. This appealed to me and California seemed like a happening place, so I wrote and asked them to hire me. They wrote back to say they were interested, but did not have a job at the time. It was a long shot, so I forgot about it and decided to go off on a grand tour of Europe with my roommate. Right before we left for Europe though, I received an offer from SRI, which I accepted starting a week after we returned from our trip. When I first got to California, I couldn’t remember where I was, because I had been in so many strange cities in such a short time.

https://daniellenewnham.medium.com/elizabeth-feinler-and-the-history-of-the-internet-83f4f7366787

Now we have Tiny, who makes almost impossibly cute custom keycaps. I am sure I was sent this article because of the Kirby content (I love Kirby) but I stuck around for her facts on how mechanical keyboards don't have to be the loudest and most annoying thing within a five mile radius:

One of the big things that drew me into it was that I can customize this keyboard however I want to, like I can do different colors for the keycaps, I can make it whatever layout I want it to be. I worked in an office, I typed on a computer like eight hours a day, so it made sense for something that I use so often, for me to customize it, decorate it, and for it to actually have very practical benefits.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21069274/tinymakesthings-mechanical-keyboard-custom-keycaps

Merry Friday,

Alex xxx.