possible sketch of a paper
PCC was a site informed by feminism, though not explicitly feminist in its goals.
- Bob as evidence of this.
- Geez, Phyllis Cole (editor of last few PCCs, then People's Computing, chosen by Bob) was a feminist. Not the pageant-protest kind, but the mobilize people at work (SRI) to demand equal pay kind. And she said Greening of America was like a spark for her too.
Tried to accomplish this through inclusion in iconography, mythologies
- Bob's story of The First Computer is intentionally about a shepherdess
- Inclusion of girls in photospread
- Phyllis referring to consciously political correct representations (the right bodies and colors) in the pictures
However, role segregation at PCC (not in a mean way, but in a "that's just how it was" way)
- men as hackers
- women as teachers, users
- iconography analysis again, photo analyses, backed up by the words of dennis allison, liza loop etc
- Phyllis Cole: PCC had women who coded, but not women who hacked.
- can i connect this or echo it with role segregation in the counterculture?
- can I support this idea of women's relations with technology with feminist readings at the time?
as computing exploded, so did subfields
- fissure of PCC into Dr Dobbs / Homebrew (hardware, hacking) , People's Computing / Recreational Computing (tool use)
- Proportion of women involved in People's Computing much higher than PCC. The publication got feminized in staff, though as Phyllis points out, men still wrote half the articles.
what was demise of these publications in the 1980s? I know Phyllis Cole left after two years because she just couldn't get a budget out of the board, and this was the same board that runs Dr. Dobb's. Hackers seemed to say that Dr. Dobbs wasn't getting much money either. My hypothesis is that hardcore computing Dr Dobbs stuck around while teach-y pubs lost audience. Didn't appeal to "computer people," didn't appeal to "teachy" people. Need to learn more about demise of People's Computing.
Why do I care? Because the % of women getting CS degrees peaked in 1984, shortly after these community shaping moments were happening.
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