Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Britain’s Computer “Revolution”
1 War Machines: Women’s Computing Work and the Underpinnings of the Data-Driven State, 1930–1946
2 Data Processing in Peacetime: Institutionalizing a Feminized Machine Underclass, 1946–1955
3 Luck and Labor Shortage: Gender Flux, Professionalization, and Growing Opportunities for Computer Workers, 1955–1967
4 The Rise of the Technocrat: How State Attempts to Centralize Power through Computing Went Astray, 1965–1969
5 The End of White Heat and the Failure of British Technocracy, 1969–1979
Conclusion: Reassembling the History of Computing around Gender’s Formative Influence
Appendix: Timeline of Key Events
Bibliography
Index

List of Illustrations

Figure 0.1 “Yearning Miss.” Cartoon from Tabacus: The Company Magazine of the British Tabulating Machine Company, May 1957, 4.
Figure 1.1 The “Powers Girl” was an advertising mascot of Powers-Samas who portrayed women’s labor as an integral part of mechanized accounting systems. Vickers News, January 1951.
Figure 1.2 A drawing of a fanciful machine (above) for “de-spiking” cacti by cartoonist William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) bears a striking resemblance to the codebreaking machine dubbed the Heath Robinson (facing page) by WRNS operators. Cartoon from Heath Robinson and K. R. G. Browne, How to Make a Garden Grow (London: Hutchison, 1938); photo of Super Robinson from I. J. Good, D. Michie, and G. Timms, General Report on Tunny with Emphasis on Statistical Methods, 1945, 382, HW 25/5, TNA. Courtesy of the Heath Robinson Museum, UK, and UK National Archives, respectively.
Figure 1.3 WRNS members working on a Colossus. The workers have been identified as Dorothy Du Boisson (left) and Elsie Booker by historian B. Jack Copeland. I. J. Good, D. Michie, and G. Timms, General Report on Tunny with Emphasis on Statistical Methods, 1945. Courtesy of the UK National Archives.
Figure 1.4 Cartoon from Mavis Tate, MP, Equal Pay Campaign Pamphlet, “Equal Work Deserves Equal Pay,” 1954.
Figure 2.1 Later images of “Powers Girls” showed the advance of electromechanical, and then electronic, computing. Vickers News, January 1951.
Figure 2.2 Recruiting pamphlet from the National Association of Women Civil Servants targeting the machine grades, 1950.
Figure 2.3 Two women operate an early electronic computer, the Power-Samas Electronic Multiplying Punch (EMP). The job and class status of each woman is presented very differently. In the advertising image (left) the worker appears more passive and white collar, while in the photo of an actual operator (right) she is more active and looks like a light industrial laborer. Powers-Samas Magazine, May–June and June–July 1957.
Figure 2.4 “Another Bobby Pin.” Cartoon from Tabacus: The Company Magazine of the British Tabulating Machine Company, 1957.
Figure 2.5 Presenting the equal pay petition to Parliament, 1954. Courtesy of the Women’s Library, London.
Figure 3.1 An ICT 1301 mainframe is delivered to a local government office by means of a crane (left) showing the difficulty of setting up suitable machine rooms in existing offices. ICT House Magazine, no. 71, February 1965. By contrast, advertising images of the same machine showed spacious, futuristic settings (right). ICT Magazine, no. 9, September–October 1961.
Figure 3.2 The attraction of a computer meant the continued promise of low-cost, interchangeable labor. Powers-Samas advertisement in Office Magazine, May 1958.
Figure 3.3 English Electric–LEO advertising brochure, 1963.
Figure 3.4 ICT Magazine photograph, 1963.
Figure 3.5 ICT advertising brochure photo, 1962.
Figure 3.6 The Powers Magazine, March 1954.
Figure 3.7 A young woman demonstrates ICT equipment at the Indian Industries Fair in 1962 as the permanent undersecretary of the Commonwealth Relations Office, Sir Savile Garner, and another man look on. ICT Magazine, August 1962.
Figure 3.8 ICL Marketing, February 1970.
Figure 3.9 Machines begin to disappear, and computer labor becomes the object of marketing. Advertisement for ICL Baric Remote Computing Service in ICL News, 1970 (above). Advertisement in Office Methods and Machines Magazine, 1967 (next page).
Figure 3.10 ICT Demonstration Team photo from ICT Magazine, September 1964. From left to right: Carole Tucker, Carol Philbrick, Carol Jordan, and Dorine Conway.
Figure 3.11 ICL Demonstration Team pictured in ICL News, 1970.
Figure 3.12 Cathy Gillespie performs the initial program load on the CEGB’s new IBM 360.
Figure 3.13 ICT House Magazine cover, July 1964.
Figure 3.14 A young woman named Anne Davis wears a punch tape dress at her retirement party. The photo ran in a “women’s section” of the company newsletter that was labeled “Strictly for the Birds.” ICL News, August 1970.
Figure 4.1 Chart of the multiple mergers and takeovers that created ICL. ICL was eventually bought by Fujitsu. National Archive for the History of Computing, Manchester, United Kingdom.
Figure 5.1 ICL advertising played on fears about unruly staff and work slowdowns, offering more automated services as a technological fix for these problems. It is little coincidence that two women are in the foreground; women increasingly represented a threat to employers as their labor force participation and union strength grew. ICL News, February 1970.
Figure 6.1 Andrina Wood at the console of a BTM computer. Tabacus: The Magazine of the British Tabulating Company, August 1958.

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