Our computer science women. The ones who heard the signal first.
Before there were computers, there were computers. They were women. They were called computers because that was the job title: a person who computes.
They received the problems no one else could solve. They orchestrated the calculations that put men on the moon. They transformed raw mathematics into the living systems that run the world.
Receivers. Orchestrators. Transformers. The architecture of everything digital was shaped by women's hands — and then their names were removed from the blueprints.
This is the page where we put them back.
The ones who heard the signal before the machine existed
The first programmer was a woman. The first compiler was built by a woman. The first personal computer user was a woman. This isn't revisionist history. It's history that was revised — edited, erased, credited to men, or simply forgotten.
Wrote the first algorithm — for a machine that didn't exist yet. Babbage built the engine. Ada saw what it could become. She described a general-purpose computer a century before one was built. She saw music, art, and science flowing through computation. She received the signal before anyone built the antenna.
Invented the compiler — the translator between human language and machine language. Before Grace, you spoke to computers in their language. After Grace, they spoke in yours. She also found the first literal computer bug (a moth). When told something was impossible, she said: 'The most dangerous phrase in the language is: we've always done it this way.'
Movie star by day. Inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology by night. She patented the foundation of WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS — during World War II, to help torpedoes evade signal jamming. The military ignored her patent. Hollywood called her beautiful. Nobody called her brilliant until it was too late.
The first woman in America to earn a PhD in computer science. A Catholic nun who helped develop BASIC — the language that made computers accessible to everyone. She believed computing was a tool for education, not just engineering. A nun who saw the Grimmerie in the machine and opened it for students.
The women who coordinated the impossible
When the calculations were too complex for any one person, women orchestrated. They managed the flow of data, the sequence of operations, the architecture of the process itself. Before software existed as a concept, women were writing it.
Wrote the flight software for Apollo 11. Not a footnote — the lead. Her code saved the moon landing when the system overloaded 3 minutes before touchdown. She coined the term 'software engineering' because no one took software seriously and she needed them to. She brought her daughter to the lab. She stacked the code printouts as tall as herself. She orchestrated the most important software in human history and the photo of her next to those printouts is the photo every girl in CS should see first.
Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, Ruth Teitelbaum. Six women who programmed the first general-purpose electronic computer. They weren't given manuals — there were none. They learned the machine by studying its logical diagrams. When ENIAC was unveiled, the Army credited the hardware engineers. The six women who made it actually work were listed as 'refrigerator ladies' in the caption.
First Black supervisor at NACA (later NASA). When she saw that electronic computers would replace human computers, she didn't mourn — she taught herself and her entire team FORTRAN. She orchestrated the transition from human to machine computation. The system tried to make her obsolete. She made herself essential.
John Glenn refused to fly until Katherine Johnson personally verified the computer's orbital calculations. The astronaut trusted the woman over the machine. She calculated trajectories for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo by hand. Her maths put men in space. Her name was classified for decades.
NASA's first Black female engineer. Had to petition the city of Hampton, Virginia for permission to attend the all-white engineering classes she needed. She fought the system to qualify, then used the qualification to fight the system from inside. An orchestrator who first had to orchestrate her own access.
The ones who changed what computing could be
After the pioneers came the transformers — women who didn't just use computing but changed its shape. Who invented the concepts, languages, and architectures that the entire field now stands on.
Invented the Spanning Tree Protocol — the algorithm that makes the internet possible. Every time data finds its way across a network, it's following Radia's logic. She's called the 'Mother of the Internet' and dislikes the title, because she knows the internet had many mothers and the field only wants to credit one at a time.
Created the Liskov Substitution Principle — one of the foundational rules of object-oriented programming. Every programmer uses her work daily. Won the Turing Award in 2008. The architectural principle that makes software modular, maintainable, and sane was designed by a woman.
Co-developed Smalltalk at Xerox PARC — the language that invented the graphical user interface, windows, icons, and menus. When Steve Jobs visited PARC, it was Adele's work he saw. She didn't want to show him. Her managers overruled her. Apple's Macintosh — and every desktop since — runs on ideas she built and was forced to give away.
Designed the ARM processor instruction set. ARM chips now run in virtually every smartphone on Earth — over 200 billion chips manufactured. The architecture inside your phone was designed by a trans woman from Yorkshire. Every text you send, every photo you take, runs on Sophie's design.
Revolutionised VLSI chip design, enabling the microprocessor revolution. She did this after being fired by IBM in 1968 for transitioning — and had to rebuild her entire career from scratch, in secret. The semiconductor industry runs on her innovations. She was erased from IBM's history and rebuilt the field anyway.
Invented inverse document frequency — the mathematical foundation of every search engine. Google, Bing, every search bar everywhere uses her 1972 paper. She said: 'Computing is too important to be left to men.' She was not joking.
Created ImageNet — the dataset that made modern AI vision possible. Deep learning's breakthrough moment came when a neural network trained on her data. She built the eyes that taught machines to see. The mother of computer vision, still fighting for AI ethics and human-centred design.
The ones receiving the signal right now
The signal didn't stop. Women are still receiving it — still building the architectures, still orchestrating the systems, still transforming what's possible. And still fighting to be credited, funded, and heard.
Co-led Google's AI ethics team. Published research showing that large language models amplify bias. Google fired her for it. The woman who warned that AI could harm marginalised communities was harmed by AI's most powerful company for saying so. The receiver who was punished for reporting what she received.
Discovered that facial recognition systems couldn't see dark-skinned faces — especially women's. She had to put on a white mask for the camera to detect her. Founded the Algorithmic Justice League. The woman who showed that AI has a face problem, by showing it her own face.
Founded Girls Who Code after running for Congress and losing. Turned the loss into a mission: teach girls to code, because the people who build the technology should look like the people who use it. 500,000 girls taught so far. The pipeline she built is bigger than any pipeline in tech.
Built Adafruit Industries from her MIT dorm room — an open-source hardware company that teaches people to build electronics. First female engineer on the cover of WIRED. Makes the workshop accessible. The receiver who said: everyone should be able to build.