Hello and welcome to the International Book Club of the Runner One Book. This term we will be reading and discussing Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans.

• The International Book Club is a shared space for discussion and is to be considered a safe space for all participants to enjoy. Please be courteous to one another.
  
• When responding to prompts, please use the following format to submit your replies:
  

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. In the Introduction, Claire L. Evans writes, “An irony: even as computer memory multiplies, our ability to hold on to personal memories remains a matter of will, bounded by the skull and expanded only by our capacity to tell stories.” What do you think the author is trying to tell her readers through this line at the beginning of her story?
   
2. “I am the computer, and the computer is me.” Can you say the same about yourself? What can you say about yourself with reference to your computer?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. Why do you think Evans named her book Broad Band?
2. If Ada Lovelace, a daughter of Lord Byron, were a man, how would her life have been different?
3. Lovelace once said about her brain: “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal.” Do you think of your brain this way? Why or why not?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. Like Grace Hopper with the Mark I, have you ever had to build something or fix something without an instruction manual? Explain. Or share your experience when you had to make something for the first time by yourself.
2. Hopper’s teammates didn’t want to sit next to her when they heard she would be a grey-haired school teacher. Whey did they have this response? How does your culture tend to treat older people?
3. Hopper would “always assign the hardest jobs to the youngest and least experienced members of her team.” Do you think this was a good idea? Why or why not?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. The female programmers thought that Pres. Eckert and John Mauchly were good bosses. Why did they think so? In your opinion, what are the qualities of a good boss?
2. Why can a woman doing secretarial work make a reliable programmer?
3. Imagine that you are a female technical worker who previously worked at EMCC and how has begun to work for Remington Rand. How would you feel?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. How do you think getting an education would be different today if Grace Hopper had not pushed for a common language to be used in computer coding? How would communication be different?
2. Grace Hopper contributed greatly to make programming languages accessible to non-experts. Without her work, technology may have been very different from how it is now. Talk about someone who has made a different in your life.
   
3. Higher-ups at Remington Rand resisted the idea of automatic programming. Why? Why do you resist changes in your learning process?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. How did the replacement of the term “programming” with “software engineering” influence the computer industry?
2. Why did Grace Hopper think that social skills were necessary for programmers? Do you agree? Why or why not?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. Does your country have many caves? If so, how are they used? Are there any traditions associated with caves in your culture?
2. Colossal Cave Adventures was the first game that became hugely popular in the U.S Do you like to play video games? What kind of games do you like? Why?
3. Discuss the impact of the game Adventure on both physical and virtual worlds.
4. In Chapter Six we read: “Even when women were invisible, it never means they weren’t there.” How do you understand the statement in the context of the stories depicted in Chapter Six?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. What are some of the public agencies that help people in your home country? How do they help?
2. Why is it possible for the author to conclude that the effort made by the Resource One women resulted in "a product more beneficial to their community"?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:
 

1. The women working on the ARPANET were outliers, foreigners in a room full of men. Have you ever felt like an outlier? Have you felt like you didn’t fit in with a certain group?
2. Women were primarily nurses, care-takers, and secretatries during this time in the U.S. Discuss some professions mainly filled by men in your country. How about jobs mainly for women? Do you think some jobs are better performed by men than women and vice-versa?
3. What was Jake Feinler’s contribution to the development of the Internet? Would you like to do her job? Why? Why not?
4. Read Radia Perlman’s poem “Algorhyme” again. Can you think of other contexts and themes that the poem / its selected fragments could depict?

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:
 

1. Why was ECHO important in increasing computer usage among women?
2. Share one historical fact about technology in your country.
3. Imagine that you are one of WELLbeings, and one of your rules is YOYOW. What message should you spread around? What are other patterns of behavior that you should follow?
4. What do you think of Echoids' communication? Is it an effective way of communication? Why? Why not?

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:
 

1. Read the future predictions recorded in the Domesday Disc on page 156. How accurate were these predictions?
2. What would you record on your Domesday Disc now, in the twenty-first century? What would you encapsulate in your message?
   
3. Cathay Marshall wanted to know the thought process of Evans. She also described how she organized her thought on page 163. Describe your thought process in solving a problem.
   
4. Would you agree with Wendy Hall that “the World Wide Web . . . is an experiment on the whole world”? Why? Why not?
   

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:
 

1. What were the positions of Marisa Bowe and Jamie Levy in ‘Word’? How were they similar and different in what they wanted to accomplich through ‘Word’?
2. On page 190, there are examples of what readers could find on Word.com, circa 1996. Imagine you are an editor of the Word.com issue in 2020. What would you publish now to offer your readers authentic stories as intended by the Word editors in the 1990s?
3. Imagine you are starting a business in your country. What business would it be? Would you hire your friends and families as Jamie did at Electronic Hollywood, a multimedia agency? Why or why not?
4. In Chapter Eleven, Claire Evans concludes: “The money survived–in some form, it always does. But the artifacts of the culture it briefly enabled are harder to find, especially without a map.” How do you understand the statement in the context of the stories depicted in Chapter Eleven?

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. Would you be more drawn to a website that provided virtual community interaction like woman.com or one that provided information and advertising? Why?
   
2. What are some of the popular websites in your country? Why do people like those sites?
   
3. Society finally took female tech-business seriously when iVillage and woman.com became successful. What are reasons why people don’t take someone seriously? What do you do when you want to be taken seriously by others?
4. Following the story of Women.com Networks and iVillage, do you think their businesses differed from companies run by men? Why? Why not?

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. What were the benefits of video games designed for girls?
2. What are the benefits and drawbacks of playing video games?
3. What are some qualities of video games that may help players in real life?
4. Read the Purple Moon company’s mission statement on page 227. Except for the cosmetics industry’s advertisements, have you ever received such an offer? When? What did the offer relate to?
5. You are a member of the International Book Club. Would you like to be a member of the Crash Test Dummy Club, as well? Why? Why not?
6. It has been concluded by many researchers now that one of the best forms of learning is edutainment. What games would you like to play in order to stimulate your individual learning process? Use argumentation provided in Chapter 13 to answer the question, taking into account the issue of gender, as well.

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.

Using the text and your own experiences, please consider the following:

1. Have a look at the constituents of the billboard A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century: https://anthology.rhizome.org/a-cyber-feminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century. Why do you think the VNS Matrix group decided to include such components? What do the constituents symbolize?
2. Let’s write a Cyberfeminist Manifesto of the International Book Club together. What is your statement that we need to include in the Manifesto to “remake the world,” as Claire Evans concludes?

You may answer all or some of the above questions. Please utilize both the text and your personal experiences when writing your response.