March 8, 2023 • 20 mins
Bridget Todd host of There Are No Girls on the Internet steps in for Jonathan to celebrate women in tech for International Women's Day.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Welcome to
tech Stuff a production of iHeartRadio How the Tech Area.
As you can probably tell from my voice, I am
not Jonathan Strickland. My name is bridget Toad, and I'm
the host of iHeartRadio's Tech and culture podcasts. There are
no girls on the Internet. Jonathan is actually the executive
(00:26):
producer of my podcast, and he was kind enough to
pass me the mic in honor of Women's History Month,
because talking about the ways that women have shaped technology
is kind of my jam on my podcast. There are
no girls on the Internet. We talk all about the
overlooked ways that women, people of color, transpolkes, queer folks,
and everybody in between has helped shape what technology looks
like and what it means to be online. Women have
(00:46):
architected much of the infrastructure of technology and the Internet,
but for lots of reasons. For one, women being more
associated with software as opposed to hardware, which is a
bit more difficult to preserve, and of course good old
fashioned sexism, our contributions go easily overlooked. So in honor
of Women's History Month, I'd like to tell you about
two women who have been foundational to shaping what it
(01:08):
looks and feels like to be online. So let's start
with Macgirls Susan Kare and talk about how a sculptor
with no tech background change the history of personal computing.
Susan Kare is an artist and graphic designer best known
for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the very
first Apple Macintosh, where she worked from nineteen eighty three
to nineteen eighty six. She was Apple's tent employee. Susan
(01:31):
Karer helped design a big part of what it looks
like to use a computer, and you can still see
her legacy today. Remember hers that iconic episode of Sex
in the City when Carrie Bradshaw's laptop computer crashes and
she gets that sad Mac face. Well, that sad Mac
was designed by Susan Karer. So if you've spent any
time at all around Max, then you know Susankare's work.
(01:52):
You should definitely google a picture of what Susan Kare
who looks like in the eighties, because there is an
iconic image of her that you should definitely see. She's
got an amazing like curly afro, She's wearing the slouchy
gray sweatshirt and the slouchy jeans. She's got her feet
kicked up on her desk at Apple, and her feet
are right next to one of those amazing gray boxy
(02:13):
early Apple computers. Definitely look it up. It is an
amazing iconic image. So Kara first got interested in graphic
design after her mother taught her needle point and embroidery
as a child, which works in small grids. It just
so happened that I had small black and white grids
to work with. She recalls, the process reminded me of
working with needlepoint knitting patterns and mosaics. I was lucky
(02:33):
to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts, So needle
point and crafting, you know, these pursuits that we kind
of think of as traditionally feminine really shaped Susan Kare's
work in technology. This is actually one of the reasons
why I love Susan Kare's story and legacy so much
is that she didn't have a traditional tech background. I
think so often, particularly for women, it can feel like
(02:53):
if you're not an engineer or a coder, you don't
really have a place in tech. But that attitude is incorrect,
not to mention very limiting technology shapes so much of
our lives that we all deserve to see ourselves meaningfully
and authentically reflected within it. And Susan Kare is a
great example of what I mean, because she didn't really
have a lot of experience with technology or even computers
(03:15):
when she first started working an Apple back in nineteen
eighty three. At that point in her life, she made
money and got experience taking pro bono graphic design jobs
making holiday cards and invitations. She then started working as
a sculptor, but didn't like it because she found it
to be too solitary of an artistic pursuit. A fact
that I love about her story is that she had
been elbow deep working on a life size sculpture of
(03:37):
a hog when she first got the call from Apple's
Andy Hurtsfield. Andy Hurtsfield was a member of the original
Apple Macintosh development team in the eighties, and he had
gone to high school with Susan Kare. He asked Susan
to hand draw some icons and fonts to help inspire
the budding mac interface. This was a completely new concept
for Susan Care. She said that she didn't know the
(03:57):
first thing about designing typeface, but Hurtsfeld had an idea.
He told Ker to find the smallest graph paper that
she could find, then block out thirty two by thirty
two inch squares to fill with color to come up
with designs since the matrix that she'd be designing in
was essentially a grid, and Lucky for Susan, her mother
had taught her needle point, and those needle point skills
(04:18):
came to her rescue. Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and
needle point and other pseudo digital art forms, all of
which I had practiced before going to Apple, she told
an interviewer in twenty twenty. Susan Care's legacy endures today.
She came up with the concept of associating unique document
icons with their creator applications, like a little image of
(04:39):
a paint bucket being the thing that you clicked to
fill a surface with color, or little scissors meeting cut.
For the copy function, she initially tried using a copy
machine that users were meant to drag and drop onto
their file to make a copy, but rendering a copy
machine was kind of tough to render at scale. She
also tried to use a cat looking in a mirror
to demonstrate copy. But I guess that was just like
(05:00):
too clunky of an image. So she might be thinking,
is this really such a big deal? Is this really
a big part of computers and technology? Yes, because keep
in mind this was during the very early days of
personal computers. At that time, they were still these big,
clunky nightmares that seemed difficult to use, and they were
really more inclined toward engineers or mathematicians, not regular people
(05:24):
using them in their house. All of the tasks that
you want to do in a computer, like throwing a
file in the trash or clicking a little disk to
save a file or not necessarily immediately obvious to people
who were using computers for the first time, and so
having those functions be simple and accessible was a big
part of why personal computing took off in the first place.
Apple specifically wanted to demystify the process of using computers
(05:46):
by having user friendly interfaces that care was foundational to designing,
and she also wanted to humanize the experience of using
a computer to reduce stress for folks who might have
been using them for the first time, which is why
when those old school max booted up, the first thing
that I use or saw was the happy Mac image
of a little computer with a smiley face, or in
the case of Carrie Bradshaw, if something bad happened, you
(06:08):
would get the dreaded sad Mac, a computer with a
frownie face. Or if you were having a really bad day,
you might get that bomb icon for when your system
was crashing. A cool thing to know about Susan Care
is that even though she is a very much part
of tech history, she is very much alive today and
still a big part of technology. And I think it's
so great when we're able to celebrate our icons and
(06:30):
our historical heroes while they're still here. Susan Care works
at Pinterest today or you're probably also familiar with her designs.
She designed the image that is modeled after a pushpin
to symbolize pinning something on a Pinterest and that spinning
button that appears when you refresh the app today. Susan
Care's notebooks are part of the permanent collections of the
New York in San Francisco Modern Art Museums, and one
(06:53):
was recently included in the recent London Design Museum exhibit
called California Designing Freedom. Ellen Lupton Senior Curator of Contemporary
Design at the Cooper Hewbitt Smithsonian Design Museum, told the
Smithsonian dot com. When Susan Kare helped create Apple's user
friendly interface in the early eighties, computers started speaking in
pictures instead of lines of code. Her bitmapped icons made
(07:15):
people feel welcomed and safe, even when the system crashed
and gave you a drawing of a bomb. Kara's original
bitmapped icons, built from little black squares, were eventually replaced
with colorful, more elaborately illustrated icons, Yet the core thinking
remains the same, and Karras continued to create warm and
accessible imagery for a range of tech companies, including Pinterest,
where she works today. What's interesting about Susan Kare's designs
(07:39):
are the ways that she's really shaped how we think
of and use computers in general. You know, when I
was growing up writing term papers on my dad's clunky
gray desktop at our computer room, I had to manually
hit the save button every few minutes, and the save
button was a little icon of a floppy disk. And
even though we no longer use sloppy discs, I have
not seen one or held one for many, many years.
(08:00):
We no longer have to hit save manually every five
minutes because things save automatically. The icon per save is
still a floppy disk. Kara told The Smithsonian about her
time and Apple. I loved working on that project. Always
felt so lucky for the opportunity to be a non
technical person in a software group. I was awed by
being able to collaborate with such a creative, capable, and
(08:20):
dedicated team of engineers. So I love talking about all
the overlooked figures in our history of tech and the Internet.
Their stories can tell us a lot about how their
identities often determine who gets remembered and who gets overlooked,
even when they literally changed the history of personal computing,
like Susan Kerr, or when they literally changed the world
like Lin Khanway did. So who is Lin Kanway? Lin
(08:42):
Kanway is an eighty five year old professor Emerita at
the University of Michigan of College of Engineering. And she
had a big hand and contributing to the modern day
Internet and smartphones. And because of her identity and good
old fashioned sexism and transphobia, her contributions were almost overlooked completely.
Even though Lynn Conway literally changed the world Conway was
(09:03):
born in nineteen thirty eight and was assigned mail at birth,
but from an early age she knew there was more
to her story as it pertains to gender. Her mom
was studying answer apology at Columbia, and she would flip
through her mom's text books looking for answers, telling Michigan
Engineering News in a really beautifully written profile about her life,
it seems like people in other cultures had found different
ways to deal with what I knew I was feeling.
(09:25):
But then that became scrambled with the thought that what
I was feeling was that I was gay, but no
one ever talked about those things. When Lynd Conway was fourteen,
she read a news story about a former Army private,
Christine Jorgensen, the first person in the United States to
publicly announce a gender transition. I knew then what I
had to do, Conway said, so, given what we know
about how narrowly society of view gender in the fifties
(09:47):
and the sixties, and to be honest even today, as
you can imagine, Conway's journey was very difficult. She initially
tried to transition while studying at MIT in the fifties.
She started taking hormones on her own and asked a
friend in medical school if he could help her find
a doctor who could help her. The friend took her
to the dean, who told her that if she didn't
stop taking hormones, she would be put in a mental institution.
(10:08):
Fear of being institutionalized or arrested was a big concern
for Conway because being trans was strongly associated with being
mentally ill and criminal behavior. If you were openly trans,
you could end up institutionalized or even arrested in some places,
which again, it's so sad to think that we really
maybe haven't come as far as you would like. After
this disappointing turn of events at MIT, she put transitioning
(10:29):
in the back of her mind. She got married, she
became a parent, and she started working at IBM. At
this point, Lynne seemed to kind of have a picture
perfect life from the outside. She was making major moves
and innovations. She was making major moves and innovations and
design at IBM, which at the time was the seventh
largest corporation in the world, while there by all accounts,
(10:51):
she was kicking ass. She invented a hardware protocol that
enabled the out of order command processing that most computers
still used today. But all of this, all of these
strides that she had been making, was put into jeopardy
because of transphobia, and that transphobia would alter the trajectory
of her life. Conway learned about the pioneering gender transition
(11:20):
work of doctor Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist known
for his clinical work with transpolkes, and decided that she
wanted to work with him. What's very heartbreaking is that,
according to this profile in Michigan Engineering, Conway and her
then spouse had worked on a solid plan together for
how Conway's transition would work within their family. They would
get a divorce and Conway would start working with doctor
(11:41):
Benjamin to transition. She would pay child support from her
IBM salary and stay in the children's lives. They decided
the children would call her aunt, and according to a
really compelling Forbes piece by Jeremy Alessandre, Conway's immediate family
and IBM's divisional management were actually pretty accepting and supportive
for the time at first. However, when IBM's corporate medical
(12:03):
director learned that Conway was planning to transition in nineteen
sixty eight, he told then CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Who fired Conway to avoid the public embarrassment of employing
a transwoman. Getting fired from IBM had a huge impact
on Conway's life. It started kind of a downward spiral
that ended up being completely destabilizing. She had to divorce
(12:24):
her spells while losing her income, which made everything that
much more difficult. California Social Services tried to keep her
away from her kids, and Conway's Expells decided that she
didn't want to have any contact with Conway because she
was worried that if Conway was in her life, the
kids would be taken by the state. Her children were
just babies at the time, two and four years old.
(12:44):
This was crushing. Conway recalls that tore me up. Let
me tell you, the hardest part about the whole thing
was that I felt like a mom to them, she
told Michigan Engineering. So she knew this was going to
be a tough process, and she relied on the lesson
that she learned from her lifetime love of outdoor adventures
like newing and rock climbing to steady herself mentally and emotionally.
As she described it, now, I had a plan to
(13:06):
get across the river. I could see the steps I
had to make. I could see the dangers and how
to protect against them. The only problem was I didn't
know where I'd end up on the other side. So
even though it cost to her family and her career,
she continued to work with doctor Benjamin to transition as
a lot of transpokets will tell you the logistics of
changing your name. Getting new identification and paperwork can be
(13:26):
a big part of navigating trans identity so that you
can work and earn an income, have a bank account,
get a place to live. But even today this process
is complicated and sometimes prohibitively expensive. Sadly, many trans folks
do not have the support or resources they need to
navigate it. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, only
one fifth of trans folks who have transitioned have been
(13:48):
able to update all of their IDs and records, and
one third haven't been able to update any of their
ideas or records. Luckily, Conway was able to use connections
that doctor Benjamin had in Oakland to get this process
done quick, which was especially important and back then in
order to avoid suspicion that could turn unsafe. Conway recalls,
you were an undocumented alien from Mars. You didn't have
(14:09):
a birth certificate. How are you going to get a job?
This was the sixties. You can think of it like
being a spy in a foreign country. If you were
found out, you'd be dealt with immediately, If not by
the police, then people on the streets. So it's probably
clear why. After transitioning, Conway started what she refers to
as the stealth phase of her career. In nineteen sixty nine,
(14:29):
Conway changed her name, hit her gender identity, and started
looking for work and computing, eventually finding a job as
a contract programmer. Then later worked at Memoires, and then
she landed the big account at the Xerots Pello Alto
Research Center, which was a huge deal. Again she started
kicking ass like she always did, just like she did
back at IBM before being fired. Her work completely revolutionized
(14:53):
how microchips were designed. She sometimes called the hidden Hand
for that work, and it led to the tech revolution
in the nineteen eighties and is the reason why we
have smartphones and personal computers. But even while she was
accomplishing all of these important innovations, she couldn't really own
them because of her identity. In a piece for the
Huffington Post, Conway called this time in her life stealth mode,
(15:14):
where she kind of just purposely stayed behind the scenes
despite creating innovations that literally changed the world. Because during
this time, her fan's identity was not public knowledge, she
only told her closest friends, HR administrators and security clearance administrators.
She purposely made herself scarce and stayed behind the scenes,
hence the nickname the Hidden Hand, and that meant a
(15:34):
lot of her accomplishments and innovations did too. Transphobobia almost
kept us from having a full accounting of this important
history and technology. So he did. Conway's contribution start being
made public well. In nineteen ninety nine, a computer historian
began investigating Conway's early innovations at IBM, which tipped her
off that others were taking credit for the work that
(15:55):
she had done on IBM under a different name. Conway
wanted to correct the record, but in order to do so,
she would need to open up about her identity and
explain why somebody with a totally different name had made
all of these big accomplishments that she was saying were
actually hers. She ended up telling the Computer Historian and
then quietly added a quote gender transition section to her
(16:15):
personal website. And this decision is what really sparked the
next chapter of her life as an advocate for trans writes.
The list of ways that Lynn Kanway has advocated for
other trans folks is very long. She's given support and
assistance to many transwomen going through transition. She's also been
an advocate for employment protections for transpolks. But one thing
that I really love is how Lynd Kanway is still
(16:37):
making big changes for transpolks working in tech today. In
twenty thirteen, Conway successfully lobbied the Board of Directors at
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, which is essentially
like a code of ethics for the engineering profession to
include transpolks, and that means it impacts the world's largest
engineering professional society. Kanway story actually has a pretty happy
(16:58):
ending after fifty years of silence. In October twenty twenty,
IBM invited staff to an event called tech Trailblazer and
transgender pioneer Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gearson. Gearson
was IBM's senior vice president of Human Resources. The event
started with a formal apology to Conway for her firing
fifty two years earlier. Conway said that she struggled to
(17:20):
hold back tears. Not only did they apologize, but they
also recognize the immense contributions to IBM's work that had
just gone unattributed. Dario Gill, director of IBM Research, presented
Conway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who
have changed the world through technology innovations. Gill noted that
Lynn's extraordinary technical achievements helped define the modern computing industry
(17:42):
and that she paid the way for how we design
and make computing ships today and forever change to microelectronics
devices and people's lives. IBM acknowledged that after Conway was
fired in nineteen sixty eight that her research still aided
IBM success. In nineteen sixty five, Lynn created the Architectural
Level Advanced Computing System one simulator and invented a method
(18:04):
that led to the development of the super Scholar computer.
This dynamic instruction scheduling invention was later used in computer chips,
greatly improving their performance. A spokesperson said Lynn Conway recalls
of the event instead of as being a resolution of
what happened in nineteen sixty eight, it became a heartfelt
group celebration of how far we've all come since then.
So Lynn Conway is actually still very much alive today.
(18:26):
She lives on twenty four beautiful acres of meadow marsh
and Woodlands and Rule, Michigan with her husband, where they
spend all of their time exploring and playing in the
outdoors like truly living her best life. And she's still
an activist who can follow her on Twitter at Lynn Conway.
And one thing I also want to add, transpokes deserve
to live full lives that account for their contributions and brilliance,
(18:46):
regardless of where they are on their journeys. Transition means
different things to different people. It can be personal, medical,
or legal steps, telling one's friends and family or co
workers using a different name or pronouns, dressing differently, changing
one's name on lead documents, etc. As I mentioned before,
it can be prohibitive for many, and trans folks deserve
to live full lives even if they are not able
(19:08):
to transition the way that doctor Conway did. I just
love doctor Conway's story because it's a good example of
how living history is all around us. We can't let sexism, transphobia,
and racist systems erase all the accomplishments of marginalized people.
And I gotta end lind Conway's story with this great
quote from her Huffing and Post piece bottom line, if
(19:28):
you want to change the future, start living as if
you're already there in. Her story is one that really
inspires me. It's one of the reasons why it's so
important to me to really tell the stories of the
contributions of women who have shaped technology, even if those
contributions and voices go overlooked, because I used to think
of technology as a big boys club where women and
other marginalized people were trying to break their way in.
(19:50):
But that's not actually true. Anytime you use a computer,
it's because of the contributions of women. Women were involved
that every single step of the process of personal computing
becoming what it is today. And if you don't always
hear our stories or our voices, it's not because we
weren't there. We need monuments to all the different ways
that women have shaped what it means to be online
and youth technology. So join me as I build them.
(20:11):
Thanks so much for listening. I'm Bridget Todd, host of Iheartradios.
There are no bodiles on the Internet, and thanks so
much to Jonathan Strickland and Tarry Harrison for the opportunity
to share these stories with you. It really means a
lot happy women's history. Mom Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
(20:33):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Welcome to
tech Stuff a production of iHeartRadio How the Tech Area.
As you can probably tell from my voice, I am
not Jonathan Strickland. My name is bridget Toad, and I'm
the host of iHeartRadio's Tech and culture podcasts. There are
no girls on the Internet. Jonathan is actually the executive
(00:26):
producer of my podcast, and he was kind enough to
pass me the mic in honor of Women's History Month,
because talking about the ways that women have shaped technology
is kind of my jam on my podcast. There are
no girls on the Internet. We talk all about the
overlooked ways that women, people of color, transpolkes, queer folks,
and everybody in between has helped shape what technology looks
like and what it means to be online. Women have
(00:46):
architected much of the infrastructure of technology and the Internet,
but for lots of reasons. For one, women being more
associated with software as opposed to hardware, which is a
bit more difficult to preserve, and of course good old
fashioned sexism, our contributions go easily overlooked. So in honor
of Women's History Month, I'd like to tell you about
two women who have been foundational to shaping what it
(01:08):
looks and feels like to be online. So let's start
with Macgirls Susan Kare and talk about how a sculptor
with no tech background change the history of personal computing.
Susan Kare is an artist and graphic designer best known
for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the very
first Apple Macintosh, where she worked from nineteen eighty three
to nineteen eighty six. She was Apple's tent employee. Susan
(01:31):
Karer helped design a big part of what it looks
like to use a computer, and you can still see
her legacy today. Remember hers that iconic episode of Sex
in the City when Carrie Bradshaw's laptop computer crashes and
she gets that sad Mac face. Well, that sad Mac
was designed by Susan Karer. So if you've spent any
time at all around Max, then you know Susankare's work.
(01:52):
You should definitely google a picture of what Susan Kare
who looks like in the eighties, because there is an
iconic image of her that you should definitely see. She's
got an amazing like curly afro, She's wearing the slouchy
gray sweatshirt and the slouchy jeans. She's got her feet
kicked up on her desk at Apple, and her feet
are right next to one of those amazing gray boxy
(02:13):
early Apple computers. Definitely look it up. It is an
amazing iconic image. So Kara first got interested in graphic
design after her mother taught her needle point and embroidery
as a child, which works in small grids. It just
so happened that I had small black and white grids
to work with. She recalls, the process reminded me of
working with needlepoint knitting patterns and mosaics. I was lucky
(02:33):
to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts, So needle
point and crafting, you know, these pursuits that we kind
of think of as traditionally feminine really shaped Susan Kare's
work in technology. This is actually one of the reasons
why I love Susan Kare's story and legacy so much
is that she didn't have a traditional tech background. I
think so often, particularly for women, it can feel like
(02:53):
if you're not an engineer or a coder, you don't
really have a place in tech. But that attitude is incorrect,
not to mention very limiting technology shapes so much of
our lives that we all deserve to see ourselves meaningfully
and authentically reflected within it. And Susan Kare is a
great example of what I mean, because she didn't really
have a lot of experience with technology or even computers
(03:15):
when she first started working an Apple back in nineteen
eighty three. At that point in her life, she made
money and got experience taking pro bono graphic design jobs
making holiday cards and invitations. She then started working as
a sculptor, but didn't like it because she found it
to be too solitary of an artistic pursuit. A fact
that I love about her story is that she had
been elbow deep working on a life size sculpture of
(03:37):
a hog when she first got the call from Apple's
Andy Hurtsfield. Andy Hurtsfield was a member of the original
Apple Macintosh development team in the eighties, and he had
gone to high school with Susan Kare. He asked Susan
to hand draw some icons and fonts to help inspire
the budding mac interface. This was a completely new concept
for Susan Care. She said that she didn't know the
(03:57):
first thing about designing typeface, but Hurtsfeld had an idea.
He told Ker to find the smallest graph paper that
she could find, then block out thirty two by thirty
two inch squares to fill with color to come up
with designs since the matrix that she'd be designing in
was essentially a grid, and Lucky for Susan, her mother
had taught her needle point, and those needle point skills
(04:18):
came to her rescue. Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and
needle point and other pseudo digital art forms, all of
which I had practiced before going to Apple, she told
an interviewer in twenty twenty. Susan Care's legacy endures today.
She came up with the concept of associating unique document
icons with their creator applications, like a little image of
(04:39):
a paint bucket being the thing that you clicked to
fill a surface with color, or little scissors meeting cut.
For the copy function, she initially tried using a copy
machine that users were meant to drag and drop onto
their file to make a copy, but rendering a copy
machine was kind of tough to render at scale. She
also tried to use a cat looking in a mirror
to demonstrate copy. But I guess that was just like
(05:00):
too clunky of an image. So she might be thinking,
is this really such a big deal? Is this really
a big part of computers and technology? Yes, because keep
in mind this was during the very early days of
personal computers. At that time, they were still these big,
clunky nightmares that seemed difficult to use, and they were
really more inclined toward engineers or mathematicians, not regular people
(05:24):
using them in their house. All of the tasks that
you want to do in a computer, like throwing a
file in the trash or clicking a little disk to
save a file or not necessarily immediately obvious to people
who were using computers for the first time, and so
having those functions be simple and accessible was a big
part of why personal computing took off in the first place.
Apple specifically wanted to demystify the process of using computers
(05:46):
by having user friendly interfaces that care was foundational to designing,
and she also wanted to humanize the experience of using
a computer to reduce stress for folks who might have
been using them for the first time, which is why
when those old school max booted up, the first thing
that I use or saw was the happy Mac image
of a little computer with a smiley face, or in
the case of Carrie Bradshaw, if something bad happened, you
(06:08):
would get the dreaded sad Mac, a computer with a
frownie face. Or if you were having a really bad day,
you might get that bomb icon for when your system
was crashing. A cool thing to know about Susan Care
is that even though she is a very much part
of tech history, she is very much alive today and
still a big part of technology. And I think it's
so great when we're able to celebrate our icons and
(06:30):
our historical heroes while they're still here. Susan Care works
at Pinterest today or you're probably also familiar with her designs.
She designed the image that is modeled after a pushpin
to symbolize pinning something on a Pinterest and that spinning
button that appears when you refresh the app today. Susan
Care's notebooks are part of the permanent collections of the
New York in San Francisco Modern Art Museums, and one
(06:53):
was recently included in the recent London Design Museum exhibit
called California Designing Freedom. Ellen Lupton Senior Curator of Contemporary
Design at the Cooper Hewbitt Smithsonian Design Museum, told the
Smithsonian dot com. When Susan Kare helped create Apple's user
friendly interface in the early eighties, computers started speaking in
pictures instead of lines of code. Her bitmapped icons made
(07:15):
people feel welcomed and safe, even when the system crashed
and gave you a drawing of a bomb. Kara's original
bitmapped icons, built from little black squares, were eventually replaced
with colorful, more elaborately illustrated icons, Yet the core thinking
remains the same, and Karras continued to create warm and
accessible imagery for a range of tech companies, including Pinterest,
where she works today. What's interesting about Susan Kare's designs
(07:39):
are the ways that she's really shaped how we think
of and use computers in general. You know, when I
was growing up writing term papers on my dad's clunky
gray desktop at our computer room, I had to manually
hit the save button every few minutes, and the save
button was a little icon of a floppy disk. And
even though we no longer use sloppy discs, I have
not seen one or held one for many, many years.
(08:00):
We no longer have to hit save manually every five
minutes because things save automatically. The icon per save is
still a floppy disk. Kara told The Smithsonian about her
time and Apple. I loved working on that project. Always
felt so lucky for the opportunity to be a non
technical person in a software group. I was awed by
being able to collaborate with such a creative, capable, and
(08:20):
dedicated team of engineers. So I love talking about all
the overlooked figures in our history of tech and the Internet.
Their stories can tell us a lot about how their
identities often determine who gets remembered and who gets overlooked,
even when they literally changed the history of personal computing,
like Susan Kerr, or when they literally changed the world
like Lin Khanway did. So who is Lin Kanway? Lin
(08:42):
Kanway is an eighty five year old professor Emerita at
the University of Michigan of College of Engineering. And she
had a big hand and contributing to the modern day
Internet and smartphones. And because of her identity and good
old fashioned sexism and transphobia, her contributions were almost overlooked completely.
Even though Lynn Conway literally changed the world Conway was
(09:03):
born in nineteen thirty eight and was assigned mail at birth,
but from an early age she knew there was more
to her story as it pertains to gender. Her mom
was studying answer apology at Columbia, and she would flip
through her mom's text books looking for answers, telling Michigan
Engineering News in a really beautifully written profile about her life,
it seems like people in other cultures had found different
ways to deal with what I knew I was feeling.
(09:25):
But then that became scrambled with the thought that what
I was feeling was that I was gay, but no
one ever talked about those things. When Lynd Conway was fourteen,
she read a news story about a former Army private,
Christine Jorgensen, the first person in the United States to
publicly announce a gender transition. I knew then what I
had to do, Conway said, so, given what we know
about how narrowly society of view gender in the fifties
(09:47):
and the sixties, and to be honest even today, as
you can imagine, Conway's journey was very difficult. She initially
tried to transition while studying at MIT in the fifties.
She started taking hormones on her own and asked a
friend in medical school if he could help her find
a doctor who could help her. The friend took her
to the dean, who told her that if she didn't
stop taking hormones, she would be put in a mental institution.
(10:08):
Fear of being institutionalized or arrested was a big concern
for Conway because being trans was strongly associated with being
mentally ill and criminal behavior. If you were openly trans,
you could end up institutionalized or even arrested in some places,
which again, it's so sad to think that we really
maybe haven't come as far as you would like. After
this disappointing turn of events at MIT, she put transitioning
(10:29):
in the back of her mind. She got married, she
became a parent, and she started working at IBM. At
this point, Lynne seemed to kind of have a picture
perfect life from the outside. She was making major moves
and innovations. She was making major moves and innovations and
design at IBM, which at the time was the seventh
largest corporation in the world, while there by all accounts,
(10:51):
she was kicking ass. She invented a hardware protocol that
enabled the out of order command processing that most computers
still used today. But all of this, all of these
strides that she had been making, was put into jeopardy
because of transphobia, and that transphobia would alter the trajectory
of her life. Conway learned about the pioneering gender transition
(11:20):
work of doctor Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist known
for his clinical work with transpolkes, and decided that she
wanted to work with him. What's very heartbreaking is that,
according to this profile in Michigan Engineering, Conway and her
then spouse had worked on a solid plan together for
how Conway's transition would work within their family. They would
get a divorce and Conway would start working with doctor
(11:41):
Benjamin to transition. She would pay child support from her
IBM salary and stay in the children's lives. They decided
the children would call her aunt, and according to a
really compelling Forbes piece by Jeremy Alessandre, Conway's immediate family
and IBM's divisional management were actually pretty accepting and supportive
for the time at first. However, when IBM's corporate medical
(12:03):
director learned that Conway was planning to transition in nineteen
sixty eight, he told then CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr.
Who fired Conway to avoid the public embarrassment of employing
a transwoman. Getting fired from IBM had a huge impact
on Conway's life. It started kind of a downward spiral
that ended up being completely destabilizing. She had to divorce
(12:24):
her spells while losing her income, which made everything that
much more difficult. California Social Services tried to keep her
away from her kids, and Conway's Expells decided that she
didn't want to have any contact with Conway because she
was worried that if Conway was in her life, the
kids would be taken by the state. Her children were
just babies at the time, two and four years old.
(12:44):
This was crushing. Conway recalls that tore me up. Let
me tell you, the hardest part about the whole thing
was that I felt like a mom to them, she
told Michigan Engineering. So she knew this was going to
be a tough process, and she relied on the lesson
that she learned from her lifetime love of outdoor adventures
like newing and rock climbing to steady herself mentally and emotionally.
As she described it, now, I had a plan to
(13:06):
get across the river. I could see the steps I
had to make. I could see the dangers and how
to protect against them. The only problem was I didn't
know where I'd end up on the other side. So
even though it cost to her family and her career,
she continued to work with doctor Benjamin to transition as
a lot of transpokets will tell you the logistics of
changing your name. Getting new identification and paperwork can be
(13:26):
a big part of navigating trans identity so that you
can work and earn an income, have a bank account,
get a place to live. But even today this process
is complicated and sometimes prohibitively expensive. Sadly, many trans folks
do not have the support or resources they need to
navigate it. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, only
one fifth of trans folks who have transitioned have been
(13:48):
able to update all of their IDs and records, and
one third haven't been able to update any of their
ideas or records. Luckily, Conway was able to use connections
that doctor Benjamin had in Oakland to get this process
done quick, which was especially important and back then in
order to avoid suspicion that could turn unsafe. Conway recalls,
you were an undocumented alien from Mars. You didn't have
(14:09):
a birth certificate. How are you going to get a job?
This was the sixties. You can think of it like
being a spy in a foreign country. If you were
found out, you'd be dealt with immediately, If not by
the police, then people on the streets. So it's probably
clear why. After transitioning, Conway started what she refers to
as the stealth phase of her career. In nineteen sixty nine,
(14:29):
Conway changed her name, hit her gender identity, and started
looking for work and computing, eventually finding a job as
a contract programmer. Then later worked at Memoires, and then
she landed the big account at the Xerots Pello Alto
Research Center, which was a huge deal. Again she started
kicking ass like she always did, just like she did
back at IBM before being fired. Her work completely revolutionized
(14:53):
how microchips were designed. She sometimes called the hidden Hand
for that work, and it led to the tech revolution
in the nineteen eighties and is the reason why we
have smartphones and personal computers. But even while she was
accomplishing all of these important innovations, she couldn't really own
them because of her identity. In a piece for the
Huffington Post, Conway called this time in her life stealth mode,
(15:14):
where she kind of just purposely stayed behind the scenes
despite creating innovations that literally changed the world. Because during
this time, her fan's identity was not public knowledge, she
only told her closest friends, HR administrators and security clearance administrators.
She purposely made herself scarce and stayed behind the scenes,
hence the nickname the Hidden Hand, and that meant a
(15:34):
lot of her accomplishments and innovations did too. Transphobobia almost
kept us from having a full accounting of this important
history and technology. So he did. Conway's contribution start being
made public well. In nineteen ninety nine, a computer historian
began investigating Conway's early innovations at IBM, which tipped her
off that others were taking credit for the work that
(15:55):
she had done on IBM under a different name. Conway
wanted to correct the record, but in order to do so,
she would need to open up about her identity and
explain why somebody with a totally different name had made
all of these big accomplishments that she was saying were
actually hers. She ended up telling the Computer Historian and
then quietly added a quote gender transition section to her
(16:15):
personal website. And this decision is what really sparked the
next chapter of her life as an advocate for trans writes.
The list of ways that Lynn Kanway has advocated for
other trans folks is very long. She's given support and
assistance to many transwomen going through transition. She's also been
an advocate for employment protections for transpolks. But one thing
that I really love is how Lynd Kanway is still
(16:37):
making big changes for transpolks working in tech today. In
twenty thirteen, Conway successfully lobbied the Board of Directors at
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, which is essentially
like a code of ethics for the engineering profession to
include transpolks, and that means it impacts the world's largest
engineering professional society. Kanway story actually has a pretty happy
(16:58):
ending after fifty years of silence. In October twenty twenty,
IBM invited staff to an event called tech Trailblazer and
transgender pioneer Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gearson. Gearson
was IBM's senior vice president of Human Resources. The event
started with a formal apology to Conway for her firing
fifty two years earlier. Conway said that she struggled to
(17:20):
hold back tears. Not only did they apologize, but they
also recognize the immense contributions to IBM's work that had
just gone unattributed. Dario Gill, director of IBM Research, presented
Conway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who
have changed the world through technology innovations. Gill noted that
Lynn's extraordinary technical achievements helped define the modern computing industry
(17:42):
and that she paid the way for how we design
and make computing ships today and forever change to microelectronics
devices and people's lives. IBM acknowledged that after Conway was
fired in nineteen sixty eight that her research still aided
IBM success. In nineteen sixty five, Lynn created the Architectural
Level Advanced Computing System one simulator and invented a method
(18:04):
that led to the development of the super Scholar computer.
This dynamic instruction scheduling invention was later used in computer chips,
greatly improving their performance. A spokesperson said Lynn Conway recalls
of the event instead of as being a resolution of
what happened in nineteen sixty eight, it became a heartfelt
group celebration of how far we've all come since then.
So Lynn Conway is actually still very much alive today.
(18:26):
She lives on twenty four beautiful acres of meadow marsh
and Woodlands and Rule, Michigan with her husband, where they
spend all of their time exploring and playing in the
outdoors like truly living her best life. And she's still
an activist who can follow her on Twitter at Lynn Conway.
And one thing I also want to add, transpokes deserve
to live full lives that account for their contributions and brilliance,
(18:46):
regardless of where they are on their journeys. Transition means
different things to different people. It can be personal, medical,
or legal steps, telling one's friends and family or co
workers using a different name or pronouns, dressing differently, changing
one's name on lead documents, etc. As I mentioned before,
it can be prohibitive for many, and trans folks deserve
to live full lives even if they are not able
(19:08):
to transition the way that doctor Conway did. I just
love doctor Conway's story because it's a good example of
how living history is all around us. We can't let sexism, transphobia,
and racist systems erase all the accomplishments of marginalized people.
And I gotta end lind Conway's story with this great
quote from her Huffing and Post piece bottom line, if
(19:28):
you want to change the future, start living as if
you're already there in. Her story is one that really
inspires me. It's one of the reasons why it's so
important to me to really tell the stories of the
contributions of women who have shaped technology, even if those
contributions and voices go overlooked, because I used to think
of technology as a big boys club where women and
other marginalized people were trying to break their way in.
(19:50):
But that's not actually true. Anytime you use a computer,
it's because of the contributions of women. Women were involved
that every single step of the process of personal computing
becoming what it is today. And if you don't always
hear our stories or our voices, it's not because we
weren't there. We need monuments to all the different ways
that women have shaped what it means to be online
and youth technology. So join me as I build them.
(20:11):
Thanks so much for listening. I'm Bridget Todd, host of Iheartradios.
There are no bodiles on the Internet, and thanks so
much to Jonathan Strickland and Tarry Harrison for the opportunity
to share these stories with you. It really means a
lot happy women's history. Mom Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
(20:33):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.