[Martin_Silenus]

That's something about low-level feminism that has been making me furious for the past 10 years. Because these people didn't even live through that era, when most women only started taking an interest in personal computers once these machines became a vehicle for social interaction (they were born after Internet became a thing, so they don't take into account the fact that these machines weren't connected, that it was a solo activity... and that, to me, explains everything about most women's lack of interest at that time).

When I was young, I would have sold my soul to hook up with a hardcore female coder who ate 68000 for breakfast. Met on February 32 at a code party, perhaps. It would have been love at first sight. We would have started a family, had kids, ethical hacker seeds, in binary underpants, learning to code before they could even walk. The Addams Family of hacking. The Tarantino-esque Killers of dev. Throwing around scroll texts writhing in all directions, nauseating rotozooms, while breaking borders in HBL sync, chasing cathode rays to spew psychedelic plasma effects in 4096 colors... damn it!

[defrost]

Growing up in the 1970s in high school I met few people into math or computers, although there were a few.

Hardly surprising, perhaps, given it was the Kimberley.

Once I hit university nearly half the math stream was female, as were the staff in the computing services and early CS courses. Many had come across to Australia from Dartmouth (UK).

As PC's became more and more popular at home items purchased for boys to play games on the number of women in the mechanics of CS started to decline, veering more into law, medicine, and sociology.

[Martin_Silenus]

Yeah... schools ARE social places. Jobs too. Personal computers at home were NOT. That's the point.

[AstralStorm]

Interesting but wrong. Almost always kids perused the computers together and shared what they made. This worked exactly like arcades at times.

So not it either. Really my guess is that at some point games started being made for boys only. You saw a lot of war and fighting, racing style games, with much less else. Even platformers started to wear those trappings.

Further, early games were always competitive. That does not generally appeal to people with less testosterone.

There were exceptions, but the rule is as it is.

[Martin_Silenus]

> Almost always kids perused the computers together and shared what they made.

It is an assumption based on what is visible.

> There were exceptions, but the rule is as it is.

There are always exceptions, but this rule is yours.

[defrost]

> Personal computers at home were NOT.

Subjective. I'm still in touch with a wide circle of both genders who had PC's at home back when we collaborated on projects together.

eg: one of these authors: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/geometric-mechanics-...

had a father who sold early Apple & IBM home computers, much fun was had by my circle building transputer array's and other such things in back sheds.