Happy Valentines Day from 2dGoggles..

Now I feel bad I didn’t have time to do a Babbage one.. but this was decidedly impromptu! Click for bigger..

 

 

As a bonus– adorable Valentines New Yorker cover, 1961– when the stereotypical programmer was a woman.

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24 Comments

  1. JamesPadraicR on February 18, 2012 at 5:05 pm

    Once upon a time, the term Computer often referred to women whose job it was to do calculations.

    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

    “Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC…..were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world’s first professional computer programmers were women, paving the way for careers in data processing as socially acceptable for women in an era of gender roles.”

  2. Teenygozer on February 18, 2012 at 2:44 pm

    Brunell, such a manly-man, he is! I didn’t see these in time for Valentine’s Day or I’d have definitely printed them off for my husband to stick on the wall next to his computer… er, I mean next to his Electronic Brain.

  3. ubiquitouspitt on February 18, 2012 at 12:27 am

    Aw! This more than makes up for the lack of “Master & Commander” Valentines, which met their unhappy end this year.

  4. Mary Ellen on February 17, 2012 at 6:06 pm

    These valentines are superb and delicious, both of ’em. Also the Addams cover. Now I’m sitting here wondering about what a Babbage Valentine would be like. “Valentine, your statistical perfection has ravished my heart. Be mine!”

    Anyway, Suffering Artist, suffering isn’t ALWAYS necessary to produce the good stuff!

    As for Brunel, if more engineers were like that, my college days (I went to a combined art-architecture-engineering school) would have been wilder than they were — which is actually saying a bit. The discussion about sex-typing programming is interesting… it reminds me of the Harvard Observatory’s program of cataloging stars from telescopic photographs at the turn of the 20th century, a job requiring extreme exactitude, patience and thoroughness and relegated entirely to women. Which led to the period/luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars being discovered by a woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and THAT eventually led to Hubble’s realization of the scale of the Milky Way in relation to the larger universe. Too bad Leavitt’s out of your time frame, Sydney. I think Babbage might have been happy to send her a valentine.

  5. fvngvs on February 17, 2012 at 10:40 am

    Hey, that NewYorker cover is by Charles Addams!
    One more reason for <3

  6. Jha on February 17, 2012 at 2:54 am

    I don’t actually dig Brunel, but DAYUM! What ELSE he gonna take off besides that hat?!

  7. the doodler on February 16, 2012 at 1:19 am

    These are absolutely great! :D

  8. ConFigures on February 15, 2012 at 2:20 pm

    Love the Brunel! Ooh, baby.

  9. chicgeek on February 15, 2012 at 2:39 am

    I love these! Thank you, Sydney!

    • sydney on February 15, 2012 at 10:43 am

      :D Can’t say I suffered drawing them.. but you’re welcome!

  10. Anon, a Mouse on February 15, 2012 at 2:01 am

    Wo0t!1!! Brunel is awesome! These would make fabulous Valentines day cards. Or e-cards.

    Actually, one of my aunts got into computer science back in the late 60s. One of her favorite pranks was to write clever “glitches” into programs and see how long it took people to figure it out.

  11. E. on February 14, 2012 at 9:47 pm

    Brunel! Happy to see you too. Is, er, that a wrench?

    • Kaazz on February 14, 2012 at 10:02 pm

      +1

    • sydney on February 15, 2012 at 10:43 am

      He’s got a hand on the brake wheel, baby, because he can stop if he wants to.

      • Tealin on February 15, 2012 at 7:37 pm

        L.O.L.



  12. Jim on February 14, 2012 at 8:59 pm

    1961: not quite right: the stereotype (and reality) was that men programmed, and women did the data entry for the men.

    • Valerie Aurora on February 14, 2012 at 9:39 pm

      This 1967 article from Cosmo portrays computer programming as decidedly women’s work:

      http://www.themarysue.com/women-programmers/

      I think the transition occurred later than 1967, at least. My best guess looking at the numbers and pop culture is that it happened around 1983 (right when the percentage of women in undergraduate computer science programs peaked and began declining). I have some half-baked theories about why, having to do with personal computers and who was allowed to spend all day playing on them, but that’s just speculation.

      (Also, awesome valentines!!! They are cool enough I’d reverse my Valentine’s Day ban for them.)

      • Barrie Jehu on February 15, 2012 at 8:00 am

        Love the valentines!
        I was a programmer in ’67.
        The majority of us were male, with a large minority of females. Data entry (typing the programmes onto punched, paper tape or cards) was predominately done by women in a seperate section). In today’s terms we were all considered ‘geeks’ of the first order, to the extent, that if we were working late, a frequent occurence, the cleaners would refuse to enter the room. :-)



    • Brian on February 14, 2012 at 10:28 pm

      Actually, my understanding is that at that time, the actual programming was considered menial work (and thus often left to women), and only the higher-level architectural work was completely male-dominated.

      • sydney on February 15, 2012 at 10:53 am

        See I always thought programmers were women because I watched “Desk Set” about 75 times.

        The ‘masculanization’ of programming is a fascinating subject- further reading (PDF)-
        http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~nathanen/files/cbi-gender.pdf



      • Phillippa on February 15, 2012 at 7:41 pm

        DESK SET. That movie is a superb pick-me-up. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn working together on anything usually is, but I think Desk Set is the happiest, sunshiniest and quotiest of all their work.

        also, the valentine’s are very sweet. thanks very much.



      • Teenygozer on February 18, 2012 at 2:34 pm

        Much love for Desk Set! Whenever I watch it, I am always particularly happy that the word “computer” is never used in the movie even once! The characters always say “Electronic Brain”, and they seem to pronounce it a particular way, with the emphasis on the first syllable, pronounced “Elle”. Always makes me wish people still called computers Electronic Brains.



  13. Kaazz on February 14, 2012 at 8:43 pm

    Awww, thanks, Sydney! We <3 you too!! :-)

    • sydney on February 15, 2012 at 10:54 am

      You are most welcome, hope you had a happy Valentines!

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