History: June 2008 Archive Page

Look who's up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper:

Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler, Ada Lovelace, credited as being the first programmer, Emily Short, who played a major role in the development of the interactive fiction development system Inform 7, and Pamela Crossely, creator of SIMPLE for academic management of web pages and related Unicode-capable applications for teaching and research. (grok-code.com)

Editor and Publisher:

The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, "WMD," "iPhone" and "anti-virus" are in, while "barmaid," "blue blood" and "malarkey" are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of describing the Sept. 11 attacks, and a different rule for use for "African-American."

Via the Reeves Library weblog, which recently also announced the discovery of a bit of journalism history and a letter found on what should have been a dark and stormy night.

I haven't read through the whole (dorkily named) article, but I'm blogging it so I can find it later when I update the "Writing for the Internet" course I'll be teaching this fall. I try to include at least a little history, since most students are surprised to learn the internet is about as old as I am. Vanity Fair:

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough--network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser--inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology.