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  1. Sep 2017
    1. Executing code entailed more than ‘menial’ labor, much like wrote domestic handi-work; to compute, female factory workers wove the core memory by hand — carefully moving long wires around rings — in what some termed the “little old lady method” (Wolfinger, 1994). Histories of craftwork have even shaped the computer itself. As his-torians of computing (Ensmenger 2010, Light 1999, Maly 2013) have suggested, pro-gramming has always been “women’s work.” Evidence includes the punch card mechanism Marie Joseph used in her Jacquard loom and Charles Babbage later fit to his analytic engine, the machine celebrated as the precursor of modern-day computers.

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