Top 10 Women Who Laid the First Stone in Technology

When we think of tech pioneers, names like Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs steal the stage. Women behind technological changes are often forgotten, and so are their efforts. However, we can’t deny their contribution to the sophisticated digital era we live in today. Women didn’t just start changing the world recently. They always did. Even decades ago when technology started evolving, women stood equal to their masculine counterparts. The technology sector is full of amazing female personalities who devised game-changing inventions and shifted human history with their spectacular ideas. Henceforth, Analytics Insight brings you the list of 10 of the most famous women in technology.  

Ada Lovelace: World’s First Computer Programmer

The daughter of famous poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was born in 1815 in London. She was homeschooled by her mother and several tutors. Ada was taught science and mathematics, which went in her favor as she is now known as an English mathematician and writer. Ada’s skills and interest in machines lead to a working relationship with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, a complicated device that was never actually created but resembled the elements of the modern computer. Ada is referred to as the ‘World’s first computer programmer.’ Alan Turning used Ada’s notes on Analytical Engine for his modern computer.  

Grace Hopper: The Mother of Computing

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 in New York and died in 1992. She was an esteemed computer scientist and one of the first computer programmers to work on Harvard Mark I. Grace’s vision of what computer eventually led her to develop COBOL, an early programming language that is still in use. She published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a computer.  

Hedy Lamarr: Inventor of Wi-Fi

Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914 in Vienna and died in 2000 in Florida, US. She was an Australian American Actress, inventor, and film producer. Hedy got a patent for her ‘secret communication system’ in 1942, which she designed with the help of composer George Antheil. The frequency system was intended as a way to set radio-guided torpedos off course during the war. Later, the idea was inspired by the creation of Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth technology.  

Annie Easley: The NASA Rocket Scientist

Annie Easley was born in 1933 in Birmingham, Alabama, and attended Xavier University where she majored in pharmacy. She became a NASA scientist, and a trailblazer for gender and racial diversity in STEM. Annie, one of the four black employees in NASA, lived her life inspiring many through her enthusiastic participation in outreach programs. She broke down barriers as an equal employment opportunity counselor. Annie’s work on the Centaur rocket project at NASA laid the foundations for space shuttle launches in the future.  

Mary Wilkes: The First Home Computer User

Mary Wilkes was born in 1937 in Chicago and graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in philosophy. She is a computer programmer and a logic designer. In her early years, Mary worked with computers such as the IBM 709 and IBM 704 for a year. Later, she joined the digital computer group and contributed to the LINC, one of the earliest systems of an interactive personal computer. Her use of the LINC at home gave her a remarkable name.  

Adele Goldberg: The Inspiration for GUI

Adele Goldberg was born in 1973 in Ohio and received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan and later pursued a Ph.D. in information science from the University of Chicago. Her greatest contribution was to the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80, which inspired the very first Apple computer. The concepts that Adele and her team set in motion became the basics for graphical user interfaces (GUI) we use today.  

Radia Perlman: The Mother of Internet

Radia Perlman was born in 1951 in New Jersey and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and learned to program for a physics class. Today’s internet is lively because of her invention of the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Radia’s work made a huge impact on the way networks self-organize and move data, and put the basic rules of internet traffic in place.  

Katherine Johnson: The NASA Mathematician

Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 in West Virginia and was one of the three black students to attend West Virginias graduate college at her time. Her trajectory analysis as a mathematician for NASA was crucial to the success of the first-ever US space flight. Katherine ran the complex manual calculations programmed into the computer at NASA for the flight by hand.  

Karen Sparck-Jones: The Pioneer in Information Technology

Karen Jones was born in 1935. She studied history and philosophy at Grinton College in Cambridgeshire. Karen’s development of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) is a weighting factory that evaluates how important a word is to a document. It is now standardized in web search engines and is being used to rank a document’s relevance to a search query.  

Elizabeth Feinler: The Original Search Engine

Elizabeth was born in 1931 in West Virginia and was the first person in her family to attend University and received a graduate degree. She ran a pre-historic Google kind of search engine in her days called ‘Network Information Center.’ The NIC was the first place to publish the resources and directories for the internet, developing white and yellow pages directories. Elizabeth’s team also developed the domain naming scheme of .com, .edu, .gov, .net, and many more.