In honor of International Women’s Day, Nth Generation would like to highlight a few of the amazing females that changed the tech world as we know it.
Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852) is often called the world’s first computer programmer. She was the assistant of Charles Babbage, the developer of the “Analytical Engine,” a calculating machine that could modify its calculation while it was running. Her notes on it are often described as "the first computer program.”
Hedy Lamarr (1914 – 2000), a famous American film actress, was also an inventor and developed a groundbreaking communication system in the 1940s that eventually formed modern day WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth.
Katherine Johnson (1918 – 2020) was one of the first African-Americans to work as a computer scientist at NASA. Her calculations of orbital mechanics played a vital role in several NASA missions, including Apollo 11, which sent astronauts to the Moon.
Radia Joy Perlman (born 1951) is known as the “Mother of the Internet.” She invented Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which allows the Ethernet to handle massive networks, deliver data, and avoid loops. Later, she improved on STP by designing TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links), making high bandwidth ethernet communication possible.
Meg Whitman (born 1956) was CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP) from 2011 to 2015, and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) from 2015 to 2018. Prior to that, she was president and CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008. During her time at eBay, the company went from 30 to more than 15,000 employees, and from $4 million to $8 billion in annual revenue.
March is Women's History Month, and we will be posting more in-depth features on women who have been trailblazers in tech throughout the month. Stay tuned!
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