For years, bolstered by an under-resourced, uncritical, or chummily compromised tech press, the tech industry comfortably shaped its own narrative. The industry’s promises, to outsiders and to itself, were idealistic and appealing: The public sphere would be democratized, barriers to education would be lowered, and daily life would become more open, efficient, and free. These narratives got some things right—and they got a lot wrong. As tech continues to make history, it seems crucial to ask what, and whom, these stories leave out.

BROAD BAND: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE WOMEN WHO MADE THE INTERNET by Claire L. Evans Portfolio, 288 pp., $27.00

In her book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, Claire L. Evans has written about women whose contributions to computing—and computer culture—are rarely highlighted in tech-history narratives (to say nothing of today’s tech mythos). Representing various phases in technological development, they are women who had a hand in building technical tools or were early explorers of the cultural applications of nascent digital technologies. They are mathematicians and programmers, academics and early-web personalities.

By Evans’s telling, what they all share is a focus on the capacity for computers to “enrich human life.” Broad Band is not a book about the business of tech; in terms of influence and impact on the industry, the importance of the women featured may be slightly overstated. What the book’s subjects do represent is the importance of the user—the person logging on at home, rather than the startup guru—in shaping digital worlds. This inverse history is welcome, especially at a time when the internet economy tends to reward owners more than participants: The founders and employees of companies like Yelp and Facebook, for example, have made millions, while the users who generate the content their platforms rely on remain unpaid. It’s also a reminder, bittersweet, that the internet used to be a bit freer, and more fun, in no small part due to the work—both seen and unseen—of women.

Any survey of women in technology would be remiss to exclude perhaps the two most famous female computer-programming pioneers. Broad Band opens with this pair. The first is Ada Lovelace, a mathematician whose proofs are considered the earliest form of the computer program. The daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron, Lovelace was born in London in 1815. Her mother, Annabella, insisted on providing her with a world-class mathematics education, in part to counterbalance the influence of Byron and his relatively chaotic, creative life. After meeting Charles Babbage in her late teens, Lovelace collaborated with him on the Analytical Engine, a computationally universal mechanical computer. Her writing on the Analytical Engine, Evans writes, “presage[d] the literature of computer science by nearly a century.”

The second is Grace Hopper, an autodidact, teacher, and Navy rear admiral, among many other things. Born in 1906 in New York City, she pursued a relatively unusual education for a woman of her generation, earning a Ph.D. in mathematics by age 28. After teaching at Vassar for several years, she joined the Navy Reserve, which led to a position at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory. Hopper stayed at Harvard after the war, where she developed one of the earliest known compilers, as well as COBOL, a programming language. By Evans’s telling, Hopper’s “most lasting contributions to the emerging field of computer programming all have to do with democratizing it.” In the mid-1940s, Hopper worked closely with the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) Six, a group of women who programmed the first all-digital, general-purpose computer for the United States Army.