On October 12, 2011, computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who designed the UNIX operating system as well as the C programming language, passed away. Thanks to his contributions, computing made a huge leap forward and enabled real-time processing and multi-threading.
"NCWIT is the National Center for Women & Information Technology, a coalition of more than 200 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits working to increase women's participation in information technology (IT)."
"From 1984 to 2006, the number of women majoring in computer science dropped from 37% to 20% — just as the percentages of women were increasing steadily in all other fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, with the possible exception of physics. The reasons women left computer science are as complex and numerous as why they had entered in the first place. But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” Women found computer science less receptive professionally than it had been at its inception.
Why do we care about a long-gone moment in early computing history when the presence of women was unexceptional?
Because it looks like women are now returning to computer science."
61 years ago today, on June 14th 1951 the very first electronic computer produced in series (and in the United States), the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the US States Census Bureau at the price of $1.6 Mio.
R. Dey, Z. Lu, and Y. Hong. (2018)cite arxiv:1803.07192Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2018 Copyright c 2018 IEEE.