Ada Lovelace Day - Women in Technology

A brief History of Ada:

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities. The computer language Ada, created by the U.S. Defense Department, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, "MIL-STD-1815", was given the number of the year of her birth. In addition Lovelace's image can be seen on the Microsoft product authenticity hologram stickers.^{[citation needed]} Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name^[26] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science.

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I could think of just one person to blog about so I decided to tell you my story and the Women in technology who influenced me. I design high end technical solutions - Data Center/ Enterprise level backups, disaster recovery, deduplication, archiving, HA solutions ... so many to list.
So probably the first woman to influence me was my BCIS College Professor Ellie Stuartson (I hope I spelled that right?) she had been in the field since the mid-fifties programming and designing uses for the computer (things like just in time delivery service programmed into the computer to keep costs down). After her it was a long time before I met another female in the technology world that I looked up to (much less ran into). My first conference in the technology world was an eye opener - In all my classes I was the only female, until the last day and the presenter was introducung clustering and everyone had trouble keeping up with her ideas and programming - I remember thinking I want to be her one day - be on the leading edge of technology! ( I am for the most part) but I rather learn than teach!

I was told once that I am not the typical women in technology (phrased "geek") - I took that as a high compliment. I hope everyone out there realizes that there are so many women who were and are in the forefont of technology, driving technology. So stop by someone's desk today and let them know that you appreciate their skills and knowledge.

ADA Lovelace Day March 24,2009

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn't matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you're going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

We will gather as many of the posts together on the day as we can, and we'll let you know exactly how we're going to do that nearer the time. For ongoing updates about Ada Lovelace day, please follow us on Twitter, join our mailing list or see our blog.