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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
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BROAD BAND

Claire Evans

The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet - written out of history, until now.
Before Steve Jobs put a personal computer in your hands, before Larry Page and Sergey Brin put any answer at your fingertips, before Mark Zuckerberg connected you to your long-lost friends, female visionaries were at the vanguard of the technology you love (and love to hate).

With BROAD BAND, VICE editor and lead singer of the band YACHT Claire Evans presents the first social history of women and the internet. These innovators, concentrating where computers have made our lives better, richer, and more connected, are the unsung heroes of network culture.

Evans explores the women who have pioneered technology, like Ada Lovelace, the tortured, imaginative daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote the first program for a mechanical computer. Grace Hopper, a navy admiral and mathematician, created machine-independent programming languages. Stacy Horn ran one of the internet's earliest social networks, Echo, out of her apartment in New York. To say nothing of database poets, desktop thespians, cyber-ingenues, glass ceiling-shattering entrepreneurs, and the self-proclaimed "biggest bitch in Silicon Alley."

Evans shines a light on these bright minds whom history forgot, showing us how women have always pushed technology forward and will continue to shape our world in powerful ways that we can no longer ignore.

Claire L. Evans is the Futures Editor of VICE's technology website Motherboard. She is also the editor of VICE's science-fiction imprint Terraform, as well as a contributor to Wired, The Guardian, and others. Previously she was a blogger for National Geographic's popular culture and science blog Universe. She is also the lead singer of the pop group YACHT.
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Book

Published 2018-03-06 by Portfolio

Book

Published 2018-03-06 by Portfolio

Comments

Broad Band is thrilling, powerful stuff. At once an electric feminist history of modern tech and a much-needed corrective to the hyper-male mythology of Silicon Valley, Evans's compelling, surprising, and eminently readable work restores due credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. This book should be required reading for anyone who's interested in how the future is actually made.

An edifying and entertaining history of the rise of the computer age and the women who made it possible. A good choice for fans of Hidden Figures. Read more...

A necessary addition to the story of women in computing, about known heroes and the fearless women and punks the world needs to know more about.

Broad Band offers a fascinating look behind the scenes of the creation of the modern world. Evans's riveting account of female innovators from the Victorian age to today fills in gaps in the history we should have had all along, and provides unique, enlightening insight into some of the most revolutionary technological advances of our time - from the world's first computer game to the creation of the '.com' domain.

Portuguese (Brazil): Editora Bestseller

If the spirit of the internet is collaborative, Evans's women embody that spirit entirely - which is no surprise, since, as Evans dutifully shows, they had a huge role in inventing it. Read more...

Broad Band is such an interesting secret history, written with great panache.

Broad Band is the Our Bodies, Ourselves for all computer users - this knowledge belongs to us. And Claire Evans tells the story like a friend who knows you get bored easily; a generous sort of brilliance that pulled me right in. This is a radically important, timely work.

Die Autorin Claire Evans gibt einen Einblick in die Geschichte von Computern und dem Internet mit besonderem Fokus auf die Bedeutung von Frauen. Read more...