BROAD BAND and 1493: Two More Great Books.

[jesse_the_k]

BROAD BAND: The untold story of the woman who made the Internet—Claire L Evans print, ebook

Beautifully written, and carefully researched, Evans has captured a first-person history of mostly-US white women in computing. She's interviewed those folks who were there before the beginning. Their hopes and accomplishments echo in the present-day. Ellen Ullman's hope, that we make technology more accessible to everyday people, is supported by Evans' history of how computing happened.

Read if ... You've heard that women's participation in computer science has declined, and you want to know the history

Avoid if ... Prefer great man stories

There are technical women in these pages, some of the brightest programmers and engineers in the history of the medium. There are academics and hackers. And there are cultural workers, too, pixel pushers and game designers and the self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in silicon alley.“ Wide as their experiences are, they’ve all got one thing in common. They all care deeply about the user. They are never so seduced by the box that they forget why it’s there: to enrich human life. If you’re looking for women in the history of technology, look first where it makes life better, easier, and more connected. Look for the places where form gives way to function. The computer is the machine that condenses the world into numbers to be processed and manipulated. Making this comprehensible to as many people as possible, regardless of technical skill, is not an essentially feminine pursuit. Nothing is. That being said, the women I talk to all seem to understand it implicitly and value it as fundamental, inalienable, and right.

[...snip...]

When I think of the first female computers, poring over tables of numbers in organized groups, I sense a hidden catalyst, something that seems to have ignited a sequence of events leading to our current, intractably technological condition. The women who invented programming, working as mediators between metal and mind, grew into the women who wrote the elegant abstractions of language that allowed us to talk to computers like we talk to people. Their innovations are a little harder to grasp then those that miniaturized and refine computer hardware. The ENIAC is in pieces, 40 units scattered museum across the country, but it’s still a thing, proof of its own existence. The ENIAC programs, however, were operations conducted in time. They existed only in those brief moments when electricity pulsed through the daisy chain patch of cables strung together for the task before being unplugged and rearranged again and again.

What strikes me here is this labor, which Evans' work brings to the spotlight, shares its invisibility with domestic work. Where stereotyped sex roles place men making things, the work of the first computers is like cleaning a house or raising children: continuous and often invisible.

More about the author: clairelevans.com

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1493—Charles C Mann English print, ebook, audiobook; Dutch print, braille; French print Readable and page-turning narrative of economic, agricultural, and civic globalization, which Mann dubs the "homogenocene." He picks apart why the Spanish and Portuguese destroyed so many lives and so much land in search of silver in the 1500s--to support China's commodity monetary system. He names and places the Africans who traveled all over the globe, putting the lie to all the default whiteness in the history I learned in school. “Much of the great encounter between the two separate halves of the world, was less a meeting of Europe and America than of Africans and Indians.” As late as the 19th century, Europeans were still in a distinct minority in the New World. It's an exquisite sequel to his fascinating 1491, about the Americas before white exploiters.

Read if ... Curious about the world.

Avoid if ... Don't want your assumptions challenged

From the book's opening passage, standing in the ruins of a city Columbus (actual name: Colón) founded on Hispaniola:

Babies born on the day the admiral founded La Isabela — January 2, 1494 — came into a world in which direct trade and communication between western Europe and East Asia were largely blocked by the Islamic nations between (and their partners in Venice and Genoa), sub-Saharan Africa had little contact with Europe and next to none with South and East Asia, and the Eastern and Western hemispheres were almost entirely ignorant of each other's very existence. By the time those babies had grandchildren, slaves from Africa mined silver in the Americas for sale to China; Spanish merchants waited impatiently for the latest shipments of Asian silk and porcelain from Mexico; and Dutch sailors traded cowry shells from the Maldive Islands, in the Indian Ocean, for human beings in Angola, on the coast of the Atlantic. Tobacco from the Caribbean ensorcelled the wealthy and powerful in Madrid, Madras, Mecca, and Manila. Group smoke-ins by violent young men in Edo (Tokyo) would soon lead to the formation of two rival gangs, the Bramble Club and the Leather-breeches Club. The shogun jailed seventy of their members, then banned smoking.

[...snip...]

Newspapers usually describe globalization in purely economic terms, but it is also a biological phenomenon; indeed, from a long-term perspective it may be primarily a biological phenomenon. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Over time the two divided halves of Pangaea developed wildly different suites of plants and animals. Before Colón a few venturesome land creatures had crossed the oceans and established themselves on the other side. Most were insects and birds, as one would expect, but the list also includes, surprisingly, a few farm species—bottle gourds, coconuts, sweet potatoes—the subject today of scholarly head-scratching. Otherwise, the world was sliced into separate ecological domains. Colón's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea. After 1492 the world's ecosystems collided and mixed as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as Crosby called it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.

Comments

[isis]

BROAD BAND sounds interesting!

I enjoyed 1493 and keep meaning to read 1491.

[jesse_the_k]

1491 blew my mind. My fave factoid was that the wild woods of the Amazon were actually carefully tended landscapes. Mann is surely handy with a metaphor and seems to have read everything.

[oracne]

Those both sound great. I keep meaning to read 1491 and 1493, and BROAD BAND also sounds like it's up my alley.

[jesse_the_k]

All three of them are lovely--page turners, and further proof that humanity survives great change.