[sliverstorm]

To my understanding, women's involvement in early computers was largely as operators and for data entry. In other words, menial labor. It would be easy to retrospectively recolor this reality, if one wanted, as our understanding of what it means to "program" a computer has changed. Today a programmer writes code, back then a programmer manually entered code written by someone else. Recall the term, "PROM programmer" (burner). A PROM programmer certainly did not architect code.

I could be wrong, of course.

[roguecoder]

The idea that coding algorithms into something executable is "menial" labor is pretty insulting to all of us currently coders, but even given that women invented multiplication routines, using human-readable commands and the IDE. That originally all of what we now consider "programming" was assumed to be menial labor is beside the point; they were doing what we're now paid good money for.

[sliverstorm]

I think you misunderstand. What I am saying is that there used to be a role similar to a scribe- someone who toggles switches according to a paper someone else wrote. Someone who feeds into the machine, punch cards someone else wrote. This is the "menial labor" I speak of.