How women helped build the internet, and why it matters

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, a new book from journalist and musician Claire L. Evans, offers a rougher and more complicated version of the history of the internet. 

"I think one of the things that really knocked me out learning about this history, is just the way it’s rewritten my conception of how the internet is and how it could be different," Evans said. "I think it’s easy to feel locked into the way things are, but the more you get into the material and the messiness of the real lived experience of all these people, the more you realize that if things had unfolded even slightly differently, we could be living in a totally different world. There’s nothing inevitable about the way the internet is. One of the major examples of that is hypertext. There was this going wisdom in hypertext design before the web — which had a preponderance of women in it — that links have to go in two directions. It’s just a totally different way of thinking about how we connect information. If we lived in a world where links went both ways, who knows where we’d be? It’s so mind-blowing to think of the many parallel universes that these stories open up."