We cannot live without our computer, mobile, or the Internet today. Life is much easier with foot pedal trashcans, windshield wipers and dishwashers. At the supermarket, all our products are scanned for billing and we take them home in paper bags. The petrol/diesel we use today is cleaner and we drink water after it has been purified. Today, computer telephony is normal. The common denominator to all these technologies is that they were invented or created by women. The world observes March as Women History Month. These women, like so many female engineers, saw a problem and set out to solve it with a belief in themselves and in the possibilities of their ideas. Some were credited with the invention while some were killed for it.

Internet, Computers and Mobile
One does not need to be a computer whiz or a techie to use the Internet. Most people access the Internet from the comfort of their home or from cyber cafés. People search for everything from baby names to beanbags, products to jobs on the Internet. However, what many of us do not know is that this search is possible because of a woman named Radia Perlman.

In the 1970s, Radia was working at a school, teaching programming for children. She made several presentations at computer conferences on tangible computing and spanning tree algorithm. She created the spanning tree algorithm as a solution for routing information to vendors. Her work was ignored until 1980. A manager at Digital Equipment decided it might solve their problem and hired her. The routing problems disappeared. Today, the spanning tree algorithm, which helps direct network traffic, has become so embedded in the Internet that Radia Perlman is nicknamed "Mother of the Internet". According to Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, Sun Microsystems, "What Radia did was to put basic traffic rules in place, so it was possible to drive from place to place without getting hopelessly lost or driving in circles." Today, she works at Sun Microsystems and is the owner of the maximum number of patents in the world. Her other invention of tangible computing, which makes programming comprehensible even to children in the age group of three to five, are now used by researchers to make animals and birds, especially parrots program. She also designed IS-IS (a modern link state routing protocol), Simple Multicast and sabotage free routing. Next time, you Google or use any other search engine, remember Radia Perlman.

Computers have become indispensable to our life today. It is also one of the most commonly used words. The term computer has been around for only 62 years and originally used to refer to a group of women! Also, the first computer, as used today, which refers to the object and not a woman, began functioning on the Valentine's Day, 1946.

The first programmers were called 'Computers'. Contrary to the boys' only image of programmers, they were all women. During the Second World War, the US Army required people to calculate all sorts of measurement like missile trajectories, target distance, etc. As most able men had been deployed in either Europe or the Pacific, the US Army placed "women wanted" advertisements. Women with mathematic degrees answered. Eighty women were given the specific task of computing ballistic missile trajectories, which were complex differential equations by hand, and they worked at the University of Pennsylvania. As these women were extremely fast at computing the answers, they were nicknamed "computers" by the Army personnel.

In 1945, the US army agreed to fund an experimental project for the all electronics digital computer nicknamed Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) project. It was built by the American physicist John Mauchly and engineer John Presper Jr. The ENIAC computer weighed over 27 tonnes and occupied an entire room at the University of Pennsylvania. However, they did not know how to operate it. Therefore, six 'computers' from the original group of 80 were selected to make it work. They were Kathleen (Kay) Antonelli, Jean J. Bartik, Betty S. Holberton, Marilyn W. Meltzer, Frances B. Spence, and Ruth L. Teitelbaum. These six 'computers' were the programmers of the first computer (the object) as we know it. Apart from programming, the women had to route data and electronic pulses through 3,000 switches, numerous cables and 18,000 vacuum tubes. They also had to replace 2,000 vacuum tubes each month. After the completion of the ENIAC project in 1946, calculations that took 30 hours to solve took 15 seconds. Each of six 'computers' later on went on to create commercial computers, microcomputers, programming languages, etc.

Grace Murray Hopper joined the US navy and fought in the Second World War. She was the first woman to attain the position of an Admiral in the US navy. She was also a programmer. Grace developed COBOL, which stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language in 1959. COBOL was the first computer language that could communicate across computers. She coined the term "computer bug" when a moth literally flew into her computer and caused it to breakdown. Krisztina Holly co-invented Visual Voice, the first Windows-based computer telephony tool. It helped users do unified messaging as you could call, email, fax, voice mail, etc. using it.

Women's contribution to computers would be incomplete without mentioning Lady Augusta Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. It is amusing that Lady Byron left her poet husband the day after Augusta Ada was born. This is because she was afraid her daughter might grow up to be a poet, which she didn't want! Therefore, she had young Ada, trained in mathematics and sciences. Ada didn't disappoint her mother and created the concept of using binary numbers. She is considered the world's first programmer.

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was born in Austria. She later became Hollywood actress and star Hedy Lamarr whose famous hit was Samson and Delilah, the first colour film ever produced, where she plays Delilah. She was the first woman to pose nude and wear strapless gowns in moviesand became notorious for it. Her lesser known other first is that she is co-inventor of frequency hopping technology and the inventor of spread spectrum technology, which is used in our cell phones, Internet, Wi-Fi phones, defence satellites and a plethora of other wireless devices.

Everyday Life
Hypatia, who lived in Egypt, developed an apparatus for distilling water, which helped purify it. She also developed the astrolabe, which is the precursor to the telescope. Monks murdered her inside a Church in 415 AD because they thought she was an enemy of the religion.

Do you remember the ad for St.Gobain glass? The glass appears invisible. Katherine Blodgett worked on monomolecular coatings and invented thin film technology where in you can coat glass and metal to the desired thickness that completely blots out reflection and glare on reflective surfaces. This technology is used in microscopes, camera, telescope, eyeglasses and lenses of the projector Krisztina Holly co-invented and patented the 'Stylus' which is used by consumers to order items over the phone or the Web by scanning the barcode of the product. Lillian Gilbreth invented the now familiar trashcan with a foot-pedal lid-opener in the 1960s. Josephine Cochran invented the dishwasher in 1893 but it was a mechanical object then and could be operated by rotating a handle. She sold the dishwasher to hotels and hospitals as mechanical objects in homes were frowned upon!

Margaret Knight designed a new machine part that helped automatically fold and glue paper bags in large numbers. She is called the mother of the grocery bag now familiar in supermarkets. In addition, she also invented the stop motion device for machines, so they can be switched off by pressing a button, invented machinery that would automatically cut soles for shoes making mass footwear manufacturing possible and invented the rotary engine used today.