A good programmer was concise and elegant and never wasted a word. They were poets of bits. “It was like working logic puzzles — big, complicated logic puzzles. I still have a very picky, precise mind, to a fault. I notice pictures that are crooked on the wall.”

What sort of person possesses that kind of mentality? Back then, it was assumed to be women. They had already played a foundational role in the prehistory of computing: During World War II, women operated some of the first computational machines used for code-breaking at Bletchley Park in Britain. In the United States, by 1960, more than 25% of programmers were women. At M.I.T.’s Lincoln Labs in the 1960s, most of those the government categorized as “career programmers” were female. It wasn’t high-status work — yet.

• Uncategorized