Submission + - Did Free Software Opposition Contribute to the % Decline in Women Coders?
theodp writes: It's been widely-reported that something changed around 1984, causing the share of women in computer science to start falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers. The conventional wisdom is that the marketing of early personal computers led to the idea that computers are for boys and created techie culture. But an anecdote in Lambert Meertens' interesting The Origins of Python suggests another possible culprit that may have also contributed to the decline — opposition to free software. Meertens discusses how copyright concerns at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) helped thwart circa-1985 efforts to freely distribute ABC, a new programming language that was designed to teach the principles of computer programming to all as part of the standard high school curriculum (Python creator Guido van Rossum helped develop ABC while at CWI and credits ABC's influence on him).
"ABC did not become the success we had hoped for," Meertens writes. "When we started the project, we naively expected it was only a matter of time before learning the first principles of computer programming became part of the standard high-school curriculum, for which ABC would be the perfect fit. In some schools, teachers did offer experimental programming classes using ABC. But, when 'informatica' finally became part of the Dutch high-school curriculum at the end of the 1980s, it turned out to be nothing but a course in using a word-processor (WordPerfect) and a spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3), both products now only a faint memory. A serious obstacle we faced was finding a way to inform the remaining plausible target group of users—non-professional computer hobbyists—that the language existed. The Internet as we know it did not yet exist. Its precursor, ARPANET, was reserved for academic and military use. For whatever reason, the CWI directors did not approve the idea of placing an ad in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, then the leading journal for computer hobbyists. The only thing we could do was to mail copies of the software on floppy disks to the lucky few who had heard of our project and had contacted us, a few hundred people in total. In their wisdom and against our wishes, the directors of the institute had insisted that the startup screen displayed the message "Copyright (c) Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, 1985," actively discouraging users from giving copies to their friends. This, by the way, was the same year in which Richard Stallman published the "GNU Manifesto" in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, which became a rallying call for the free software movement."
Four decades and billions of dollars in CS education spending later, educators, Big Tech, and nonprofits have rediscovered the importance of that mid-80's goal of having everyone learn some form of programming in school and are trying to make that happen, albeit in sometimes self-serving, punitive, tech sponsor-centric (despite limitations), and other dubious ways..
"ABC did not become the success we had hoped for," Meertens writes. "When we started the project, we naively expected it was only a matter of time before learning the first principles of computer programming became part of the standard high-school curriculum, for which ABC would be the perfect fit. In some schools, teachers did offer experimental programming classes using ABC. But, when 'informatica' finally became part of the Dutch high-school curriculum at the end of the 1980s, it turned out to be nothing but a course in using a word-processor (WordPerfect) and a spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3), both products now only a faint memory. A serious obstacle we faced was finding a way to inform the remaining plausible target group of users—non-professional computer hobbyists—that the language existed. The Internet as we know it did not yet exist. Its precursor, ARPANET, was reserved for academic and military use. For whatever reason, the CWI directors did not approve the idea of placing an ad in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, then the leading journal for computer hobbyists. The only thing we could do was to mail copies of the software on floppy disks to the lucky few who had heard of our project and had contacted us, a few hundred people in total. In their wisdom and against our wishes, the directors of the institute had insisted that the startup screen displayed the message "Copyright (c) Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam, 1985," actively discouraging users from giving copies to their friends. This, by the way, was the same year in which Richard Stallman published the "GNU Manifesto" in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, which became a rallying call for the free software movement."
Four decades and billions of dollars in CS education spending later, educators, Big Tech, and nonprofits have rediscovered the importance of that mid-80's goal of having everyone learn some form of programming in school and are trying to make that happen, albeit in sometimes self-serving, punitive, tech sponsor-centric (despite limitations), and other dubious ways..
