A review by hollyd19
Broad Band by Claire L. Evans

hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Starting back in the 1800s with Ada Loveless and working up to (nearly) present day, Broad Band covers various women who have contributed to the computing & the internet, from its earliest development to cyber culture-making. There was the war effort, with women like Grace Hopper and the ENIAC Six contributing to programming and debugging. Then came the secretaries who were tasked with bringing organization nascent networks, ultimately contributing to protocols and standards we rely on to this day. Add in the women who were the first community moderators and influencers before the web as we know it even existed. Ultimately, Broad Band is an excellent supplement to the male-dominated history of computing and connectivity. 

I loved this book. I majored in information science and have worked in tech spaces, and yet a huge amount of the content was new to me. It is also written very well, with approachable descriptions of technical concepts as well as a very narrative-esque tone (as opposed to academic). Broad Band serves as a history of the internet with an intentionally subversive focus on the women who often played backbone (yet highly under-recognized) roles in advancing the field. Seriously, so much of what we take for granted about our heavily-deviced world was made possible the tenacity and brilliance of countless women, technical and otherwise. It was a treat to learn more about them! 

Like most “untold stories,” there are a number of parts that made me rage in frustration over the erasure and treatment of women (and honestly about how so much remains familiar/relatable). A particularly egregious example was the intentional “professionalization” of computer programming into “engineering” so that credentials would be required, thereby ousting the very women who pioneered the field. There’s another story about a woman named Radia who presented an entire technical solution only for a man at the end of the meeting to outline the exact same problem and and call for a solution. He ENTIRELY ignored her! 

I’d highly recommend this book to just about anyone, especially if you are a fan of nonfiction accounts. It’s remarkably relevant due to the internet’s massive influence on society and culture.