Nine women. Nine stories. One incomplete history.

The history of technology has a problem: it’s incomplete.

Not because the facts are missing — but because for decades, the official narrative chose who deserved to be remembered. And systematically, women were left out. Their contributions were ignored, minimized, attributed to others, or simply never told.

This series exists to correct that. Not as a symbolic gesture, but because these stories matter: they’re part of understanding how the technology we use every day actually works, who built it, and under what conditions.

Each entry profiles a woman whose work changed the world. Some are known. Others should be far better known than they are.

The Series

  • Ada Lovelace (1842): She wrote the first algorithm in history for a machine that didn’t yet exist. In the 1800s, she had already described — with conceptual precision — what we now call general-purpose computing. Read the article
  • Hedy Lamarr (1942): Hollywood actress and inventor. She designed the frequency hopping system that decades later became the foundation of Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi protocols. She patented the idea in 1942 and received nothing. Read the article
  • Grace Hopper (1952): She built the first compiler in history when everyone told her it was impossible. Without her work, programming would still be reserved for mathematicians with access to machine code. Read the article
  • Gladys West (1956–1986): She spent 42 years at a naval base calculating the exact shape of the Earth. That mathematical model is the foundation of GPS. Nobody knew for decades. She died in 2026 at 95. Read the article
  • Margaret Hamilton (1969): She led the team that wrote the Apollo 11 flight software. Three minutes before landing on the Moon, her priority system saved the mission. She also coined the term “software engineering.” Read the article
  • Radia Perlman (1985): She invented the Spanning Tree Protocol, the algorithm that keeps networks from collapsing into infinite loops. Without it, the internet as we know it couldn’t have scaled. Read the article
  • Ida Holz (1988): She built Latin America’s digital academic network almost from scratch, and connected an entire region to the internet. She was the first Latin American inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Read the article
  • Hu Qiheng (1994): She connected China to the internet without the supercomputers the U.S. and Japan had refused to sell them. She built the infrastructure that now supports the world’s largest internet network by number of users. Read the article
  • Mira Murati (2025): After helping lead OpenAI through the launch of ChatGPT, she founded Thinking Machines Lab to build AI systems that businesses and developers can adapt to their own work. Read the article

The series continues. If you know other stories that should be here, reach out.