Motherhood is significantly marked by birthing and nurturing.
It thrives on courage, strength, selfishness and love.
The reward is the sheer joy of seeing what was birthed grow and blossom.
Mothers are truely heroes and here is celebrating mothers of technology. Women who have birthed and nurtured inventions that have grown into significant landmarks and pillars of innovations in today’s tech world.
1. Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer
Ada was born with mathematical talent and skills and interest in machines.
This led to her working relationship with Charles Babbage.
Babbage was the inventor of the “Analytical Engine”, a complicated device that was never actually created, but resembled the elements of a modern computer.
As a result of her work on the project, Ada is often referred to as the “world’s first computer programmer”.
Her notes on the Analytical Engine became Alan Turing’s inspiration for his work on the first modern computer in the 1940s.
2.. Radia Perlman: The Mother Of The Internet
Radia was nicknamed “Mother of the Internet”, for her invention of the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) .
Her work was instrumental in making today’s internet possible.
Making a huge impact on the way networks self-organize and move data, Radia put the basic rules of internet traffic in place.
The protocol she designed in the 1980s (IS-IS) is still actively relevant for routing IP today.
Radia is still a computer programmer and engineer for Dell EMC.
Her innovations enable today’s link state routing protocols to be robust, scalable, and easy to manage.
3. Grace Hopper: The Esteemed Computer Scientist
Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper was an esteemed computer scientist and one of the first computer programmers to work on the Harvard Mark I.
Her work led to the development of COBOL, an early computer programming language we still use to this day.
On September 9, 1947 Grace Hopper recorfed the world’s first computer bug .( a real-life moth that was causing issues with the computer’s hardware.
4 Hedy Lamarr: The Inventor of WiFi
Hedy was a self-taught inventor and film actress.
She created a frequency hopping system to set radio-guided torpedos off course during the war.
Her idea eventually inspired Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth technology commonly used today.
She was awarded a patent in 1942 for her “secret communication system”, designed with the help of the composer George Antheil.
5. Adele Goldberg: The Inspiration For GUI
Adele was instrumental in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80,
Small talk is an object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally.
Adele had shown Steve Jobs Smalltalk as a way to “give away the kitchen sink”.
The program inspired the very first Apple computer.
The concepts that Adele and her team set in motion also became the basis for graphical user interfaces (GUI) we use every day.