Spare us another story about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. The not-so-well-known fact is that women also have written the story of the internet and related technology. From Ada Lovelace, who programmed the first computer (or “thinking machine”) in 1843, to British author and philosopher Sadie Plant, whose online writings inspired a generation of politically engaged women in the early 1990s, female visionaries have been at the vanguard of technology and innovation.

Writer Claire L. Evans gives these unsung female heroes their due, tracking their roles in many of the formative moments in internet history in a discussion of her book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

Evans, a former editor of the multiplatform Motherboard, is a contributor to Vice, The Guardian, and Wired, among other outlets. Her presentation is part of the Library’s 2019 Summer Reading Program: Dare to Discover.