THEThe collective imagination often paints the birth of the Internet as an epic of young university students in sweatshirts or soldiers locked in secret laboratories. However, behind the invisible architecture that today allows us to send an email, scroll through social media and send a message, I knowno so many names of brilliant women who didn’t just “lend a hand”they were not simple extras, but they were the brilliant minds who literally created the foundations of the Internetdesigning languages, protocols, systems and visions without which the Internet would not be what we know.
Women of the Internet: Grace Hopper
In the early days of computing, around the 1940s, computers were silent and inscrutable giants. To make them work required infinite patience and almost inhuman precision. There was no easy way to give them orders: you literally had to “think” like an electrical circuitbending to the logic of the machine. The first to oppose this mechanism, was Grace Hopper, mathematician and US naval officera monumental figure in this sense. Petite, but with a steely determination, Hopper decided that this submission of man to the machine was an insult to intelligence and no longer acceptable.
Teaching machines to understand us
This is why he made sure that the machine understood us. It was she who invented the first system that allowed you to write orders using simple wordsalmost as if you were talking to a colleague. This changed everything. It was the spark that made it possible to create Cobol, the Common business oriented language, that is, a computer language designed for everyday work. Thanks to her, technology has come down from the pedestal of secret laboratories and entered offices and homes. It was no longer just calculation, it was communication.
From Grace Hopper (in the photo) to Adele Goldberg, the mathematicians and scientists who designed the language and social soul of the Internet. (Getty Images)
Elizabeth Feinler, the woman who drew the map of nowhere
By the 1970s, the Internet had become a reality, but it was little more than an experiment: it was called Arpanet and it was a wild territory, without names and without addresses. Imagine having to send a letter in a city where no street has a name and no house has a number. It would have been chaos, and the Internet would have died there. But as we know this was not the case. The credit goes to a certain Jake, not a man, however. A woman. His real name was Elizabeth Feinler and it was she who decided that this chaos had to end.
Director of the Network information center, the Network Information Center, an office that at the time was the true beating and beating heart of Arpanet, it was she who sat down and decided how to name the posts on the internet. It is precisely thanks to him and his team that today when we look for something, we write addresses that end in .com, .gov, or .edu. Feiler created a compass to avoid getting lost in the void. And as he did so, he wasn’t just cataloging data, was building the foundations of what is now our digital identitytransforming a jungle of cables into a tidy map where each of us can be found.
Radia Perlman, the invisible architect who saves the Internet every second
If Grace Hopper created the language and Elizabeth Feinler designed the map, Radia Perlman was the woman who built the tracks and the traffic lights. Today, without his work, the Internet would be like a gigantic metropolis without traffic lights, intersections or one-way streets: a mass of (data) cars that collide and remain stuck in the same place forever. Software designer and network engineer, his golden age was the 1980s. In that decade, the network was growing dramatically and was facing a technical problem that threatened to kill it in the bud: the “loops”, or vicious circles.
The traffic regulation that tames the collapse
In practice, in fact, what happened was that the messages collided, came back, went around in circles. As if to say that the network risked suffocating itself. But while others fretted over the wires, Perlman looked at the problem with pure, almost brutal logic. And it was in this way that created a sort of invisible “traffic regulation”.called Spanning tree protocolor Spanning Tree Protocol. An ingenious system that it allows the network to understand on its own which is the fastest and safest way to get a message at destination, preventing data from getting lost in vicious cycles. A silent job that happens every time we send a message or watch a video. So if today the Internet is solid and never collapses, it’s because the rules Perlman wrote continue to stand guard in the shadowsensuring that the connection between us always remains open.
Stacy Horn, the visionary who brought the “living room” to the computer
While these scientists were building the technical framework, the first woman who decided that the Internet would not remain a cold tool to exchange academic or military data, it was Stacy Horn. We are in 1989 in New YorkHorn worked for a large telecommunications company, but felt something was missing. In those years, the internet was an extremely masculine, technical and often somewhat aggressive environment. She wanted to create a place where the conversation was deeper, more cultured and, above all, inclusive. So, with a computer and a few modems installed literally under his bed in his Greenwich Village apartment, founded Echoor East Coast Hang Out, one of the first virtual squares, demonstrating that the Internet was not just used to move data, but to unite people who wanted to talk, laugh and feel less alone.
Adele Goldberg and the invention of the clickable world
If, however, we were to indicate the exact moment in which the computer stopped being a machine for scientists only and became the object we keep on our desks today, we should look at the work of Adele Goldberg. Between the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties, this researcher carried out a total revolution: gave digital a human face. In the seventies, at Xerox Parc in Californiausing a computer was a job for a few: the screen was black and every command had to be typed without errors. Adele Goldberg decided to break down this wall of complexity. Together with his team, he developed the graphical interface, replacing lines of code with icons, windows and menus. It was she who understood that, instead of writing abstract commands, it was more natural for the man to click on the picture of a cardshe. And it was exactly this intuition that paved the way for everything we see on our screens today.
Hopper, Feinler, Perlman, Horn and Goldberg: Women computer scientists’ right to be remembered. Like men
Grace Hopper, Elizabeth Feinler, Radia Perlman, Stacy Horn, Adele Goldberg are some of the female figures who contributed fundamentally to the birth and development of the Internet. All these names, however, they remained obscured for a very long time, slipped into the silence of a story almost always written by men. Yet, theirs was a logical rebellion against exclusivity: they took a technology created for war calculation and reprogrammed it for universal connection. Recognizing their names today is not only an act of justice, but it means stopping looking at the Internet as a technical miracle and restore scientific dignity to those who designed every single beat.
