> > (Whoever figures out
> > why girls freely went into CS in the 70s and stopped abruptly in the mid 80s will
> > make a lot of HR departments very happy).
>
> Simple: It's when the hippie (I mean that in a good way) ideals and womens'
> liberation movements of the 60s gave way to rampant consumerism.
Except that rampant consumerism started the nanosecond the war ended in the 40s (there was a company selling hundreds of thousands of 3 inch black-and-white TVs for $99 in 1947, for one example that kind of translates to today if you make that 3 feet). It's not something that was invented in the 80s, nor was it eschewed by hippies in the 60s (the "All You Need Is Love" Beatles had a merchandising operation that would make modern Disney jealous). So plenty of women who grew up in that environment went into CS and worked at IBM, DEC, Apple, Atari, Mattel Electronics, and so on.
So I'm inclined to believe what AWJ said about home computers being at least related to the cause. Which would be sort of ironic since many of them ran games and other software made by women, and several early 80s Apple machines had their final PCB layout done by Collette Askeland, whom I'm retroactively adding to my list of early heroes.
|
Index 
Flat 
Re: Atari: Game Over is now on Netflix streamer
Reply
