Introduction
Diverse People Make Computing History
Not all who push for change join a protest march. Instead, some people serve as role models or educate the next generation. Others may build content for their communities, start new programs, or shatter glass ceilings.
While recent decades have seen an influx of East and South Asian professionals into computing, the field has one of the lowest rates of employment for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. This is especially true of technical specialties like engineering and programming. There is also an unfortunate hierarchy within the field. For every well-paid job at a tech company there may be half a dozen supporting roles for highly specialized contractors and vendors. This “shadow ecosystem” is less white, more female, older, and lower paid.
Meet nine talented individuals who led the way for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) contributions in computing and explore related materials from the CHM collection.
Joe Thompson
Joe Tompson
First Generation Programmer
In 1951 at MIT, 18-year-old Joseph “Joe” Thompson was among the first operators of a new kind of machine: the Whirlwind computer. Started during WWII as an analog flight simulator for the Navy, Project Whirlwind benefited from an inspired form of mission creep. It grew into a pioneering, real-time, digital computer that established the model for generations of both military and business machines to come.
MIT recruited Thompson for college, and his job running and programming Whirlwind at night introduced him to computing and supported him as a college student.
They ... were looking for bright young kids who were not going to college ... that’s how I got involved. I’ve never had to look for work since.
— Joe Thompson
Thompson was the first Black employee in Whirlwind’s early years. He was also one of the few Black employees at RAND corporation, where he helped program Whirlwind’s direct successor, the continent-spanning SAGE early warning system for nuclear attacks. SAGE helped pioneer computer networking, interactive computing, and large-scale software development.
Earning greater responsibility at RAND and other companies throughout his career, Thompson eventually retired as a branch head. Outside of work, he found time to mentor teens in troubled schools, encouraging them to continue their education.
From the Collection
Thompson at the Whirlwind operator's console, early 1950s
Thompson took evening classes at MIT and then spent his nights running, coding, and troubleshooting the giant computer.
Whirlwind rack of vacuum tubes (detail)
Occupying an area the size of a suburban house, Whirlwind's 5,000 vacuum tubes and 3K of newly invented core memory let it drive cockpit mockups of every plane the Navy then possessed.
In His Own Words
Watch Joe Thompson’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
Lois Jennings Britton
Lois Jennings Britton
Behind the Hippie Hackers
In 1968, Lois Jennings cofounded the iconic Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools with her then-husband, counterculture legend Stewart Brand. It was a loose collection of ideas and practical techniques that inspired a generation of hippies and computing pioneers.
Jennings’ first job after college was as a “hidden figure” doing calculations for the Navy, both manually and with computers.
I went to an interview at a school district nearby where it came out that I was Native-American—American Indian at the time—and the assistant superintendent of that particular district got up, walked across the room, closed the door, came back, sat down, and asked me if my birth certificate said I was Black or White. I thought, nope, not going to do that. So, my first job after the early brush with teaching, I became a mathematical aide is what the job title was. The position was held by mostly women, and what we were were computers.
— Lois Jennings
Jennings met Brand while he was attending the National Congress of American Indians, exploring his interest in Native culture. Their tumultuous marriage lasted through the peak of the Catalog years.
The Catalog’s guiding principle was “coevolution,” the idea that human culture evolves in step with its tools. Jennings and Brand had been exposed to Douglas Engelbart’s futuristic computing lab, and they believed that computers might become the most flexible tools of all.
Jennings was a founding director and treasurer of the People’s Computer Company, an offshoot of the Catalog community that helped inspire personal computing. She later married Keith Britton, and they were both involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hippie hackers and small computer enthusiasts whose members included the future founders of Apple.
From the Collection
Whole Earth Catalog
A hippie riff on mainstream catalogs from Sears and otheres, Brand and Jennings' Whole Earth Catalog offered entries on tools as well as a range of topics from organic farming and solar power to desktop publishing, midwifery, and electronic synthesizers.
Whole Earth Truck Store
Jennings is in the middle row at left with braids at Whole Earth Truck STore in Menlo Park, Claifornia. She later served as a founding director at the nearby People's Computer Company, famed for its role in the evolution of personal computing.
Stock Certificate from Mullen Computer Products Inc.
Jennings served as a treasurer for this small maker of acessory boards for personal computers. It was started by another friend from the Homebrew Computer Club, Bob Mullen.
Acknlowedgements page, Whole Earth Catalog, 1970
Brand belatedly acknowlwedged Jennings as a cofounder at the Catalog's 50th anniversary in 2018.
In Her Own Words
Watch Lois Jennings Britton’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
Hector Ruiz
Hector Ruiz
Suing Goliath
Growing up in Piedras Negras, a Mexican border town, Hector Ruiz aspired to open an auto repair shop. But, when he was thirteen, American missionary Olive Givin suggested he instead attend high school on the US side of the border, and she offered to pay his first year’s tuition. Ruiz went on to become CEO of a top company in another country and sue the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer chips.
A brilliant student, Ruiz was ahead of his classmates in subjects like math and chemistry, which Mexican schools taught early, but he was behind in English. With mentoring from his teachers, however, he graduated as class valedictorian. That brought an automatic scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, where Ruiz majored in electrical engineering and continued on to earn a doctorate at Rice.
Ruiz began his career in the semiconductor industry and discovered that he had a talent for solving tricky manufacturing problems and for management. He rose steadily through the ranks at Texas Instruments and Motorola and was then recruited to be the heir apparent to the CEO of ailing chipmaker AMD. He accepted the offer.
People were having fun at AMD. They were a scrappy little company ... They wouldn’t take no for an answer on anything. What I saw was just an opportunity to transform it into something bigger, but not necessarily change some of those things that helped them get to where they were.
— Hector Ruiz
While AMD’s chips were often superior, the smaller company was being strangled by Intel’s monopolistic practices. When Ruiz became CEO, he sued Intel and won. He then spun off much of AMD’s manufacturing to a new foundry, in partnership with a Middle Eastern prince.
From the Collection
Opteron chip
Why Did AMD sue Intel? AMD's next-generation Opteron chip was more advanced than Intel's rival Itanium. But Intel used a mix of pressure and illegal tactics to discourage comptuer makers from adopting Opteron.
Photomask from AMD's Opteron chip
Photomasks are the semitransparent plates used to copy the pattern for each layer of a chip (integrated circuit) onto the wafer.
Ruiz playing with The Teenagers, early 1960s
Ruiz is in the uppper left. The band won a battle of the bands contest broadcast by radio station XEMJ in Ruiz's hometown of Piedras Negras.
In His Own Words
Watch Hector Ruiz’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
Marc Hannah
Marc Hannah
Silicon Revolutionary
When Stanford PhD student Marc Hannah met his doctoral advisor, Jim Clark, he never dreamed he would help design a chip that would revolutionize computing. Their Geometry Engine made possible the astonishingly realistic imagery in the popular movies Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 and launched the wildly successful Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). The chip’s offshoots are essential to modern AI and “big data.”
Hannah grew up near Chicago and was recruited to the Illinois Institute of Technology through a Bell Labs scholarship program for talented minority students. He went on to Stanford, where he became interested in graphics and was introduced to Jim Clark. Clark recruited Hannah and several other students to cofound Silicon Graphics with him.
We were all academics basically ... Jim was a big motivating factor ... [with] his Geometry Engine architecture. He was the one who said, ‘Let’s go off and do a company around this stuff,’ and, you know, we were students and some staff, but I don’t think any of us had any experience before that of dealing with startups or even thinking about going off to do that kind of thing.
— Marc Hannah
Hannah had helped Clark with the first Geometry Engine at Stanford, and at Silicon Graphics he took over the design of the second generation of the chip, the core technology of the company’s graphics terminals and workstations. He eventually became a vice president and chief scientist.
The Geometry Engine established the niche for graphics coprocessors, specialized chips that run alongside CPUs to handle the heavy math needed to manipulate images. Descendants are today found in nearly every smartphone and computer, where they speed up repetitive calculations from graphics to deep learning.
After leaving SGI, Hannah worked for or started several technology ventures, including NVidia. He is a partner in the Strategic Urban Development Alliance (SUDA), a real estate company that seeks to make a positive difference in low-income areas.
From the Collection
Second generation Geometry Engine chip
In the image, the second generation Geometry Engine chip designed by Marc Hannah is shown in the center of a pin grid array (PGA) used to mount it to a circuit board. The gold-colored pins on the array plug into the board.
Design drawing for second generation Geometry Engine chip
The first generation Geometry Engine chip had been laid with Xerox PARC's pioneering graphical software for designing large custom chips, ICARUS, by Douglas Fairbairn. Engineers could send a design over the ARPANET and a prototype chip back by mail.
IRIS
Silicon Graphics machines like this Professional IRIS got press for powering special effects in films like The Abyss and Jurassic Park, as well as countless vieo games. But most customers used them for comoputer aided design (CAD) and scientific visualization.
In His Own Words
Watch Marc Hannah’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
P.S. CHM owes a special debt to Clark, Hannah, and their cofounders. The Museum’s main building was part of the original SGI campus!
Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor
Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor
Programming Change
Mitch Kapor hoped to create a new, progressive kind of company at the heart of the computer industry. In 1982, that wasn’t Silicon Valley but greater Boston. Kapor and cofounder Jonathan Sachs developed Lotus 1-2-3, an improved version of the pioneering spreadsheet software VisiCalc. Riding the explosive growth of the new personal computer industry, the company was an instant powerhouse, with $53 million in sales its first year.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a few American companies had begun efforts to become more diverse. Among tech firms, Boston minicomputer pioneer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was a leader, with its company-wide Valuing Differences training seminars and hiring practices.
But Kapor wanted to go farther at Lotus and create “. . . a 1980s company with 1960s values.” He hired Freada Klein as director of employee relations, organizational development, and management training. She had previously cofounded the first group to address sexual harassment in the US. With Kapor’s backing as CEO, Klein helped shape a set of policies that established accountability, including diversity.
One of the things that Freada did was to ask individual employees to evaluate how well their particular manager, and also their VP, lived the corporate values in their day-to-day work and day-to-day relationships, and then we tied a portion of that manager’s bonus to those ratings.
— Mitch Kapor
This sort of tie to compensation remains rare today. Klein also helped create an ombuds function and a diversity council, and she made Lotus the first tech firm to sponsor an AIDS walk when the disease was highly stigmatized.
Klein went on to consult on diversity to a wide range of corporate clients as well as on the Civil Rights Act of 1991. She and Kapor married long after they had left Lotus, and their venture firm and foundation support a variety of diversity, inclusion, and education efforts, including the new oral histories featured in this story. Klein emphasizes the importance of laying the groundwork for diversity and inclusion early in a company’s development. She says, “If you’ve already built a company that isn’t diverse and now, how do you retrofit it? How do you turn the Titanic around?”
From the Collection
AAAC brochure
This 1985 brochure describes the Affirmative Action Advisory Commitee (AAAC) at Lotus Development Corporation. Efforts included recruitment, scholarships, training, using minority vendors, and more. See pages 46-52 for the document. The Lotus Corporate Philantropy program funded projects to combat the social injustices of racism. See pages 28-32 in the document.
Lotus 1 - 2 - 3
Lotus's spreadsheet imporved on a "killer app" for the personal computer, the VisiCalc spreadsheet. The Lotus version was more powerful and optimized for the new IBM PC. It came with a database and graphing, hence the full product name: Lotus 1-2-3.
In Their Own Words
Kamal Al Mansour
Kamal Al Mansour
Launching Blackware
In the late 1980s, lawyer and artist Kamal Al Mansour set out to bring pan-African culture to the digital realm. He started with CPTime Clip Art, the first major disk of Afrocentric imagery for personal computers. The title wryly reclaimed the expression “Colored people’s time,” a stereotype that Black people are always running late. For Al Mansour it became a personal call to action: “It’s our time, it’s time for people of color to be online, to be digital.” He also started a dial-up service for research and messaging called CPTime On-Line.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Al Mansour had little interest in computing. He majored in political science at UCLA and then went on to UC Hastings law school Law in San Francisco. His first job was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory handling contracts and intellectual property related to NASA’s rockets. That sparked an interest in technology, where he discovered how little room there was in the field for Blacks or their culture.
“... on PBS [I] saw a Princeton professor sharing a software program called Culture, and … you’re calling it Culture, but you’re showing Michelangelo. You’re showing Da Vinci ... You’re showing Greece, and the Greeks, and the Colosseum, but I’m not seeing pyramids. I’m not seeing the Sphinx. I’m not seeing anything else in the world that was the precursor to what you have in your software program, which was the root, for me, of culture. So it was that night that I said, I’ve got to do something.”
— Kamal Al Mansour
After his television epiphany, Al Mansour made it his mission to change things with CPTime Clip Art. His follow-up program, Who We Are, included hundreds of questions and answers about Black civilizations. He soon had a catalog of titles addressing a variety of topics, including diseases affecting people of African descent and a program that sought to raise the self-esteem of Black youth. His materials were being bought by school districts and universities and were covered in major print and TV media.
As bigger organizations like NetNoir began to provide Afrocentric content for the exploding online world, Al Mansour chose not to follow. He instead became a full-time artist, working with both Afrocentric and universal themes.
From the Collection
Who We Are product cover
Product cover Who We Are, a disck by Al Mansour's AfroLink Software covered Afrocentric history.
Who We Are disk home screen
Al Mansour's AfroLink Software Published half a dozen titles by 1993, either clip art or interactive media created with Apple's Hyper Card program. As was typical of digital content at the time, prices ranged from $35 to $70 per disk.
In His Own Words
Watch Kamal Al Mansour’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
Lettie McGuire and Sean O’Connor
Lettie McGuire and Sean O’Connor
Building the Soul of Cyberspace
When he was hired by Lettie McGuire, Sean O’Connor knew it was more than a job. Together, the two of them created a major portion of the Afrocentric net and helped to bring many others online as pioneering web designers
NetNoir’s mission was something that I was truly a believer in—that we have a story that needed to be told ... and it needed to be our voices telling the story.
— Sean O'Connor
McGuire had just been made Art Director and programmer of NetNoir, billed as “the soul of cyberspace.” The cofounders, David Ellington and Malcolm CasSelle, handled the business end and left much of the content to McGuire and O’Connor. They decided which celebrities to interview, what features to add, and were responsible for coding the site itself. At its height, NetNoir was the most vibrant Afrocentric community online, with Motown Records and Vibe magazine contributing to the music section, Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis writing on sports, and a range of interactive forums with celebrities. McGuire and O’Connor wrote spotlights like “Technology Month” and “Black History Month.”
NetNoir started on AOL, which gave it social features that were not common on the web for another decade. McGuire and O’Connor had to become experts in AOL’s own page design language, RainMan. But NetNoir’s web presence was also growing under McGuire’s direction, and there was plenty of opportunity to break new ground in web design.
By the late 1990s, NetNoir, GoAfro on CompuServe, and other dedicated Afrocentric sites were fading, along with the first wave of online communities overall. The communal roles of the pioneering Afrocentric sites would be inherited by content creators within mass social media, and even later by Black Twitter. McGuire and O’Connor continued their careers as top web designers and went on to launch some of the first technology centers for BIPOC youth—O’Connor in Jamaica and McGuire in San Francisco and Harlem.
From the Collection
AOL version of NetNoir homepage
NetNoir was the first "infopreneur" funded by AOL's Greenhouse Program, created to foster unique content on what was then the nation's largest online service. AOL included social features lik profiles and chat rooms that wouldn't become common on the web until the 2000s.
Web version of NetNoir homepage, 1996
The web version of NetNoir launched less than a year after the AOL version. NetNoir's editorial policy was inclusive--cofounder Malcom CasSelle told the LA Times, "This is by Black people, but it's for everyone."
First online Black History Month spotlight, NetNoir, 1997
NetNoir webpages celebrating Black History Month included topics like the Harlem Renaissance, the African Slave Trade, African American Folklore, and Frederick Douglass.
Virtual gallery showcasing McQuire's watercolors
A virtual gallery showcasing Lettie McGuire's watercolors appeared in the web's first version of the metaverse, VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language). The gallery was at the 1996 SIGGRAPH graphics conference.
In Their Own Words
Visit the collection to read Lettie McGuire’s Personal Account.
Watch Sean O’Connor’s full oral history video or read the transcript.
This story was supported by a generous grant from the Kapor Center, along with five related events and a series of ten oral histories with BIPOC computing pioneers. Please suggest candidates for future oral histories!