Broad Band summary

The year was 1941, and the world – with the exception of the United States – was at war. That changed on December 7, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the US declared war on Japan.

Grace Hopper, a 36-year-old mathematics professor at Vassar College, was determined to serve her country. So she quit her job and joined the US Navy. As a mathematician, she assumed that she would spend her military career cracking enemy codes. Instead, the Navy sent her to Harvard to become the third programmer of the world’s first computer.

The word “computer” predates computers as we know them today. Originally, it referred to a person who did complicated mathematical problems by hand. The people who did these computations – the original computers – were mostly women.

In fact, there were so many women working as computers in the first half of the twentieth century that the term “kilogirl” came into use. This measurement referred to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor. 

When the US bombed Cambodia in 1969, it set off a wave of protests and strikes. Pam Hardt-English, a computer-science graduate student at UC Berkeley, was soon involved in the protests. But she and her fellow student activists had a bigger idea: they wanted to create communication networks to connect various centers of the counterculture.

By the summer of 1970, Hardt-English and two of her classmates had dropped out of UC Berkeley. They moved into Project One, a large warehouse in San Francisco that was home to a group of hippies. It was there that the vision of Hardt-English and her former classmates would become reality.

Before the internet, there was the ARPANET – an early online network funded by the US military and built in 1969. The ARPANET allowed scientists at US universities to share resources and communicate with each other. 

By 1972, the ARPANET had around 30 connections, and it became clear that the growing network needed to be better organized. The central office for ARPANET affairs – the Network Information Center, or NIC – was part of the Stanford Research Institute. The computer engineers there were too busy to take on the task, however. So it went to Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, a chemist-turned-information scientist. In taking charge of the NIC, Feinler’s job would be to maintain order on the early internet.

Stacy Horn was a graduate student in New York City in the early 1980s when she joined The WELL, an online community based in California. Horn enjoyed the conversations with journalists, ex-hippies, and computer-programming enthusiasts – but she soon tired of it. Dialing up to The WELL in California was like making a long-distance call, so her phone bill was huge. She craved a community that had a more authentic New York City feel, too.

So, in 1990, Horn created her own community, which she called the “East Coast Hang-Out,” or Echo. 

Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web. That means he invented the internet, right? 

Not so fast. The internet is a network of computers, while the World Wide Web is a network of interconnected pages built in a communal language called Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. 

At the height of the dotcom bubble in New York City, Jaime Levy dubbed herself “the Kurt Cobain of the Internet.” It was a grandiose title, but not totally unwarranted. Growing up in Southern California, Levy had been more interested in the punk rock scene than in computers. That changed when a boyfriend showed her how to create computer animations. Levy was captivated. 

It was while studying at New York University that Levy experimented with the interactive media that would bring her fame.