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Researching the untold story of Canada’s keypunch girls

3 m

Oct 18, 2018

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Engineering & Technology

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Social Science & Culture

Media

By: Sonia Mendes

Ingenium - Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation

Source: Gazette

uOttawa's first computer

Photo Credit

George Ben/AUO

uOttawa's first computer, in 1958, was an IBM 650.

Last summer, the Canada Science and Technology Museum offered up access to its collection so that researcher Jennifer Thivierge could study “keypunch girls” — the women who punched holes in data cards and fed them into machines or tabulators, starting in the 1950s. The University of Ottawa’s Gazette writes about her findings, and what they say about gender discrimination within the field of computer science.

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Researching the untold story of Canada’s keypunch girls

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Jennifer Thivierge, computer science, keypunch girls, gender discrimination, artifacts

Sonia Mendes

Sonia Mendes is the English Writer/Editor for Ingenium. She loves digging behind the scenes to tell the quirky, colourful stories of museum life and all things related to science and innovation.

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