Mar 2009
Finding Ada
Tue Mar 24 2009 Filed in: Women in tech | About Heidi
It's Ada Lovelace Day and this my blog post for my pledge.
Buried in the credits of Heidi book 1 (and also in the foreword to the paper version) is the following acknowledgement to the women who inspired Heidi. I thought I'd write about the biggest influence on Heidi, and not coincidentally the first name on this list.
I met GG back in the early 80's in my first computer science class as a freshman. It was a weed out class, a tough large lecture class on algorithms where they threw you into the deep end. With minimal instructions, we had to figure how to login and navigate a command-line system (MPE), find and learn a text editor (no up down cursor controls), and generally fight with the Pascal compiler. This was a weed out class and you needed an B or better to move on. Only about ten percent of the class made it. It was a big class of hopeful computer programmers with a male-female ratio of maybe five to one.
To survive the class, I spent a few nights a week in the terminal room (open 24x7) tanning myself in the glow of a Vt100. That is where I got talking to talking to a fellow classmate, GG.
The first thing she showed me was the the other thing in the terminal room, the Plato system and it's online multiplayer gaming system. Sure, I had met girl computer users before, but GG was the first hard-core one I'd met. The first who made me feel like a newb, not just in technical skillz but in online culture. She led me in some of my earlier explorations of Bitnet and taught me a lot about how systems worked and where they didn't (ahem). She was also deep into InfoCom games, so we often discussed puzzles and solutions between coding sessions.
Okay, let me head off a distracting concern some might have. I'm male, she's female. We were not romantically. I never really thought of her that way. She just wasn't my type (and I don't what that means either since I did date geek girls later in life) My attraction to her was entirely about a kindred geek spirit. She was simply smart, creative, curious, and technically experienced.
We progressed on in the CS program (we both passed the weed out class). She got a terminal operator job at a large bank and one of her duties was running reports to chase down credit card fraud. She helped bust a couple of people.
After a few years, our little community of hackers splintered into factions around rival BBSes and online flame wars. Though we never disagreed with each other directly, GG and I ended up on opposing sides of a particularly nasty schism that ended with the police getting involved in a hacking investigation (no arrests, they had no idea how to treat us back then). After that, we all kind of parted ways and lost touch.
I haven't seen her since the late 80's. She may have gone on to be a dot-com success story or a helluva CIO. She was never one to self-promote or call attention to herself, so who knows? She wasn't a genius hacker, or a particularly gifted innovator. Just a keen, bright techie. The whole male/female thing never really came into play - we were all just geeks. Her confidence and whatever attitude formed the foundation for my writing of Heidi. There are times when I'm writing when I can hear her in my head. And that makes me smile.
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