Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  The shift from programmer to software engineer was an easy enough signal for female programmers to interpret. The new paradigm, subtle as it may seem, “brought with it unspoken ideas about which gender could best elevate the practice and status of programming,” Janet Abbate writes. She argues that this symbolic exclusion, in concert with the more concrete factors at play—wage discrimination, lack of childcare, lack of adequate mentoring and support—signaled to women to avoid computing just as it was suffering from an industry-wide shortage of talent. Salt in the wound: the skills female programmers brought to the table were precisely those “software engineering” desperately needed.

  The software crisis, after all, was one of deliverables. The reason projects were routinely coming in late and over budget was because they were built on rickety expectations. Getting the initial requirements right for a piece of software requires being able to listen to the client, to parse messy real-world problems into executable programs, and to anticipate the needs of nontechnical users. Despite its reputation as a discipline for introverted perfectionists, social skills are valuable in programming—even essential. Grace Hopper understood this, and it’s her early self-education in a wide range of nontechnical fields that made her such a profoundly competent programmer. As she told a historian in 1968, to make the link between “the computer people” and the outside world of clients, problems, and possible applications, “you needed people with more vocabularies.”

  Those vocabularies aren’t innately feminine, but soft skills of communication are certainly socialized as women’s values. During the software crisis, aspects of software design that rely on “stereotypically feminine skills of communication and personal interaction” were “devalued and neglected,” ignored by male programmers and skipped over in software engineering curricula. As a result, the industry suffered, and perhaps suffers still.

  The first computers became obsolete before they became operational. The Mark I led to the Mark II, then III; no sooner was the design for the ENIAC frozen and construction begun than John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were inventing its successor. Those early computers had a shelf life of only a few years before something smaller, faster, and smarter came along, a pattern that has continued, breakneck, into the present day. The same can be said for programming, which leapfrogged from a tedious afterthought to an art form in less than a decade. In 1950, when the most competent adding machines on Earth required entire office floors of real estate, IBM predicted the global market for computers would be five—total. But two thousand computers were in use globally by 1960. In the 1990s, when I finally came online, IBM was selling forty thousand systems a week. Punched cards became magnetic tape as code became language, while transistors ceded to integrated circuits, and then microprocessors, miniaturizing in exponential leaps as the boxes housing them sprouted screens and keyboards, becoming household objects, and portals for work, play, and connection.

  When I think of the first female computers, poring over tables of numbers in organized groups, I sense a hidden catalyst, something that seems to have ignited a sequence of events leading to our current, intractably technological condition. The women who invented programming, working as mediators between metal and mind, grew into the women who wrote the elegant abstractions of language that allowed us to talk to computers like we talk to people. Their innovations are a little harder to grasp than those that miniaturized and refined computer hardware. The ENIAC is in pieces, forty units scattered in museums across the country, but it’s still a thing, proof of its own existence. The ENIAC programs, however, were operations conducted in time. They existed only in those brief moments when electricity pulsed through the daisy chain of patch cables strung together for the task before being unplugged and rearranged again and again.

  The architects of those fleeting arrangements—the kilogirls, computer girls, operators, programmers, whatever you want to call them—changed the world. As the cultural theorist Sadie Plant writes so elegantly, “When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. When computers became the miniaturized circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them . . . when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female.”

  With our twenty-first-century brains, we all have a shot at being as clever as Ada Lovelace, the Harvard computers, or a wartime ballistics calculator at Penn. But there’s only so far we can reach before we hit the ultimate threshold—the glass ceiling over all humanity. My current machine, a top-of-the-line slice of MacBook Pro, will be obsolete by the time these words make it to ink. The machine code that Grace Hopper dreamed would someday write itself is now the engine that powers the world. It has allowed me to find the women we’ll meet in this book, to e-mail them out of the blue, to wave hello to their ever-less-pixelated faces, and to make plans ending with me in their living rooms, looking at manuals, looking at photos, drinking green tea. Such is the case with world-changing technologies.

  It’s never easy to anticipate what they will become, or just where they will take you.

  PART TWO

  Connection Trip

  Chapter Six

  THE LONGEST CAVE

  The longest cave in the world is in central Kentucky. Its limestone passages stretch four hundred miles beneath the earth in twisting patterns as intricate as the roots of the ancient hickory forests above. Inside, cavers skirt bottomless pits, pass fountains of orange stone, and discover deep, icy subterranean rivers. Between the sunlit world and the depths below, white mist swirls at ankle height, like the breath of ghosts.

  Kentuckians have fought bitterly to control access to the secrets of Mammoth Cave. In the early twentieth century, hardscrabble locals conned tourists into the sinkholes on their land, spurring “cave wars” that ceased only when the National Parks Department took control, evicting landowners and installing staircases, subterranean toilets, and even a grand dining room 267 feet below ground, its ceiling encrusted with snowballs of gypsum crystal. Serious cavers now enter Mammoth’s wild entrances through locked grates, using keys granted by the Parks Department. They bring with them small carbide headlamps to keep warm and light the darkness.

  The earliest people to map Mammoth were enslaved, installed underground by landowners to lead tours. The first of these guides, Stephen Bishop, named its features—the River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue—and discovered the eyeless white fish that swim in its deepest waters. When Bishop was sold, along with the caves, to a Louisville doctor, he was ordered to draw a map from memory. As cave maps do, his drawing looked like “a bowl of spaghetti dumped on the floor,” but it detailed the nearly ten miles of passages that Bishop had discovered and remained the most thorough map of Mammoth’s reaches for more than fifty years. One nameless noodle, a passage forking off the subterranean Echo River, became important a century after Bishop was buried near the cave’s main entrance, his grave marked by only a cedar tree.

  In Bishop’s lifetime, every landowner in Central Kentucky claimed a cave entrance; if not a natural sinkhole, then a crevice blown open with dynamite. Bishop believed that all these fragments were linked into one larger system, and his instinct was shared by generations of Kentucky cavers. At the bitter end of their remotest passages, the caves breathe: cold air whispers even miles below the surface, and water siphons deeper and deeper into the Earth.

  Proving Bishop’s connection theory became the cause of the Cave Research Foundation, a ragtag group of caving enthusiasts who spent nearly twenty years linking the disparate caves neighboring Mammoth into a single Flint Ridge system. It was a family affair; once they were old enough, children who grew up playing in the woods surrounding the foundation’s clapboard lodge pushed past the farthest points surveyed by their mothers and fathers. By 1972, the Cave Research Foundation
had surveyed nearly every Flint Ridge lead to its endpoint, sometimes with ten-hour belly crawls through womblike tunnels. The final connection, as they called it, was imminent.

  The cavers believed that Flint Ridge met Mammoth past a choke of sandstone boulders at survey point Q-87, a remote spur miles from the surface, but moving the boulders with lengths of metal pipe was backbreaking work. One expedition tried an alternate route, through a vertical crevice called “the Tight Spot.” Caving humor has a nihilistic streak: the Tight Spot is a dark slit so small that only one person in the party dared enter. She was a reedy computer programmer, all of 115 pounds, named Patricia Crowther.

  Pat wedged herself into the Tight Spot and came out the other end onto a mud bank. In the cool carbide light, she spotted the calling card of a previous visitor: the initials “P. H.,” engraved on the wall. Back at the surface, her party kept the discovery secret. Anyone familiar with the area would know the legend of old Pete Hanson, who had explored Mammoth before the Civil War. Those had to be his initials down there, which could mean only one thing: Flint Ridge and Mammoth were connected, in a single contiguous cave spanning 340 miles. The monumental discovery would come to be known as the Everest of speleology.

  Pat returned to broach the juncture ten days later. “By the way, Pat—you’re leading this one,” the other cavers told her. Just beyond the Tight Spot, they waded into muddy water up to their chests, until only a foot of air separated the subterranean river and the dripping cave ceiling. Soaked through and caked with mud “like chocolate frosting,” they struggled to keep their headlamps dry. Eyeless crayfish skittered around their waists. When the passage opened, it revealed a wide hall, where they glimpsed the edge of a hand railing: a tourist trail in the heart of Mammoth Cave. The link was complete. Only moments before, they’d been farther afield than any cavers in history; now, weeping and falling over each other in the water, they were only a few steps away from a public restroom.

  Riding to base camp in the back of a park ranger’s pickup, they looked up at the stars, bright in the summer sky. Lying “in the open truck bed, with the treetops filing past overhead and falling away behind into the darkness,” they contemplated their feat in silence. The long drive reinforced its magnitude: had they really traveled these seven miles underground? Their final passage, through the Tight Spot and beyond what would come to be known as Hanson’s Lost River, joined an unmarked line on Stephen Bishop’s hand-drawn 1839 map. After hamburgers and champagne at dawn, they slept.

  “It’s an incredible feeling,” Patricia wrote in a journal account of the trip, “being part of the first party to enter Mammoth Cave from Flint Ridge. Something like having a baby. You have to keep reminding yourself that it’s really real, this new creature you’ve brought into the world that wasn’t here yesterday. Everything else seems new, too. After we wake up on Thursday I listen to a Gordon Lightfoot record. The music is so beautiful, it makes me cry.”

  The new creature Patricia felt she had brought into the world had always been there, slumbering in the darkness of geologic time. What she’d given birth to that day was not the cave but the map—not the thing, but its description. By wedging herself into the Tight Spot and bringing her lamplight to the darkness, she moved an earthly place into the symbolic Cartesian plane. Or at least that’s how she might have seen it, being the party’s mapmaker.

  Back home in Massachusetts, Pat and her husband Will ran a “map factory,” tracking the cartographic data each Cave Research Foundation expedition surfaced. Both being programmers, they brought considerable technical sophistication to mapmaking. As Pat described it, the couple typed raw survey data from “muddy little books” into a Teletype terminal in their living room, which was connected to a PDP-1 mainframe computer at Will’s workplace. From this data, they generated “plotting commands on huge rolls of paper tape,” using a program Will wrote—Pat contributed a subroutine to add numbers and letters to the final map—which they “carried over and plotted using a salvaged Calcomp drum plotter attached to a Honeywell 316 that was destined to become an ARPANET IMP.”

  The Crowthers’ maps were simplified line plots, but they represent some of the earliest efforts to computerize caves, a leap in technical sophistication made possible by the hardware to which they had access: a PDP-1 mainframe and a Honeywell 316, a sixteen-bit minicomputer, both far beyond consumer-grade. Will Crowther’s employer was Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Massachusetts company that specialized in advanced research. In 1969, BBN was contracted by the U.S. government to help build the ARPANET, the military and academic packet-switching network that spawned our present-day Internet. A few years after they used it to plot their cave maps, the Honeywell 316 minicomputer was repurposed and ruggedized to become an Interface Message Processor, or IMP—what we now call a router. These routers formed a subnetwork of smaller computers within the ARPANET, shuffling data around and translating between primary nodes, a vital component of the Internet then and now.

  Will was one of the strongest programmers at BBN, and his tight, frugal code expressed his fastidious manner. A lifelong mountaineer, he taught Patricia to climb the vertical faces of New York’s Shawangunk Mountains, and was known to hang from his office door frame by his fingertips while deep in thought. Will was a caver, too, and the couple spent all their vacations deep underground. “I get cold when he’s not keeping me company,” she wrote in one caving diary. “There’s quite a draft here; the cave’s breathing.”

  Will didn’t come along on the final connection trip. He’d been at Patricia’s side on earlier surveys, pushed to his limit in the underground wilderness. But the final survey fell in early September, right as their daughters, Sandy and Laura—aged eight and six, respectively—were headed back to school. One of the Crowthers had to stay home, buy the girls their books and school clothes, take them to the dentist, and register them for classes. Will knew how much the expedition meant to Patricia. She had, after all, found the lead, what cavers call “going cave,” and she was dying to see it through. He told her to go ahead. He’d take care of the girls.

  When Pat came home, deeply moved by the experience, Will was waiting for her. They stayed up late, holding each other and talking about the connection. When Will fell asleep, Pat crept to the Teletype terminal in the living room and entered, as quietly as she could, the bearings of the survey they’d made in Kentucky. She ran a coordinate program, and the data spooled into her hands in the form of a long paper tape. In the morning, Pat and Will brought the tape to his office, and she watched the BBN computer plot the link she’d made, beneath the earth, between two vast and lonely places. “Now I can sleep,” she wrote.

  Caving is unforgiving. Until the late 1960s, anyone entering Mammoth would have passed the glass-topped coffin of Floyd Collins, a country caver who died pinned by a boulder. Cavers become enveloped by the earth, their every move constrained by walls and ceilings of rock. They eat very little—candy bars and canned meat—and carry their waste with them back to the surface. They have no sense of time. Emerging, they may be surprised to see the moon. As the Crowthers’ friends Roger Brucker and Richard Watson wrote in The Longest Cave, their account of the connection trip, “The route is never in view except as you can imagine it in your mind. Nothing unrolls. There is no progress; there is only a progression of places that change as you go along.”

  Making the route visible is the central pursuit of serious caving. The Cave Research Foundation had a group doctrine: no exploration without survey. A map is the only way to see a cave in its entirety, and making maps is caving’s equivalent of summiting mountains. It’s also a survival mechanism. To stay safe, cavers map as they go, “working rationally and systematically to locate known passages.” It’s no wonder the hobby attracts computer programmers. Code is a country populated by the fastidious. Like programmers, cavers may work in groups, but they always face their challenges alone.

  Not long after the connection trip, Patricia a
nd Will’s marriage deteriorated. They divorced in 1976, after a separation that left Will “pulled apart in various ways.” Caving without Patricia in the company of their mutual friends in the small Cave Research Foundation community “had become awkward.” Alone and surrounded by their maps, including an extensive survey of the Bedquilt section of Mammoth they’d made together in the summer of 1974, he consoled himself with long Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and late nights coding at home. When Sandy and Laura visited their father, they usually found him hard at work on a long and elegantly structured string of FORTRAN code. He told them it was a computer game, and that when he was done, it would be theirs to play.

  The novelist Richard Powers once wrote that “software is the final victory of description over thing.” The painstaking specificity with which software describes reality approaches, and sometimes even touches, a deeper order. This is perhaps why Will Crowther felt compelled to make one last map. This one wasn’t plotted from his wife’s muddy notebooks but rather from his own memories. Translated into seven hundred lines of FORTRAN, they became Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first computer games, modeled faithfully on the sections of Mammoth Cave he had explored with Patricia and mapped alongside her, on a computer that would form the backbone of the Internet.