20.12.2007, 08:07
Joanna Hoffmann

Joanna Hofmann was a physicist and archeologist, before Jef Raskin hired her as the 5th person on the MacIntosh team in 1980, as the only marketing person in that early group. As should be clear, she's the second person from left above.

She seems to have made many very important contributions to the original Mac and MacOS, including writing the first draft of the User Interface Guidelines. She was hired not least for her international background as Raskin says here:
For example, he [Bruce Horn] attributes the internationalization of the products to the Lisa group, but it actually began when I hired Joanna Hoffmann into the Mac group partially because of her international background and my interest in providing international fonts.

She's been having a WP stub for quite some time, but no more.

The Grand Unified Model (1):
She seems to have been hooked on starting memes:
If the Mac were able to be released in other countries, with menus, icons, dialogs, dates, and sorting orders translated to different languages, it would make a big improvement in our potential market share. I can't even remember when I started to recognize that the localization ability was necessary; it was a meme (probably started by Joanna Hoffman) that infected us all in the Mac group.

"Alice The Macintosh's first great game"
Obviously Mrs. Hoffmann was
pretty good at that one:
Within a few weeks, I must have played hundreds of games of Alice, but the most prolific and accomplished player was Joanna Hoffman, the Mac's first marketing person. Joanna liked to come over to the software area toward the end of the day to see what was new, and now she usually ended up playing Alice for longer and longer periods. She had a natural talent for the game, and enjoyed relieving work-related stress by knocking out the rival chess pieces. She complained about the game being too easy, so Capps obliged by tweaking various parameters to keep it challenging for her, which was probably a mistake, since it made the game much too hard for average players.

Snowcrashing
For all who have read Stephenson's "Snowcrash, most probably Joanna Hoffmann was the role model of 1 of 2 main female characters in that crashing novel. Guess who!

15.02.2006, 09:51
TinyP2P and BO
The World's Smallest P2P Application.

Written by Ed Felten, with help from Alex Halderman.
Their work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

ANTS-CD: The Shocking Extasy of The Forbidden

Black Opium has been found on Fandom Nation (dotcom). If you want to inspect yourself, go to the Fast, Loose & Lovely Section.

De gustibus est disputandum?

12.02.2006, 11:42
Kimiko Ryokai & Justine Cassel

ANTS-CD¹: It's party time at Home Sweet Cube.

This lady with friend and dog's name is Kimiko Ryokai. She does pretty cool projects at MIT. She's from Tokyo and went to study Linguistics and Psychology at SUNY in Albany, N.Y., USA.

lngr had a link to the I/O Brush project (Kimo Ryokai, Stefan Marti, Hiroshi Ishii, Josh Monzon & Rob Figueiredo) a while ago. Goldchen also liked that painttool, it seems.

(motzes has dug up a tool worked out by Jeff Han et alii at NYU that might hold even more promise and relies on a simple biometric technique well known in those circles called FTIR²).

Before joining the Tangible Media Group and after SUNY, Miss Ryokai finished her Masters study with the Gesture and Narrative Language Group led by professor Justine Cassell.

Now a full professor at Northwestern University in the departments of Computer Science and Communication Studies, and director of the interdisciplinary graduate program in Technology and Social Behavior, Mrs. Cassel's homepage is well worth a visit. Heir appearant to Adele Goldberg I

¹ Everybody got that now? It means "And Now To Something - Completely Different", which in turn is a quotation from the MPFC.
² Frustrated Total Internal Internal Reflection. Do not let that irritate you. Those Neural Network guys always use these strange humanizations for their simple primitive SBSes^3
3 Sand Based Simulators

09.02.2006, 21:30
The Danny Dig
netfiles.uiuc.edu

the catfish pointed there.

01.02.2006, 08:35
Diane Pozefsky
CS Research professor at UNC and (former) Director of Storage Networking Architecture at IBM.

Not quite in line with the other heroines in the gallery cause she's got a quite large entry in english wp already.

Her homepage is at www.cs.unc.edu.

She did her CS studies at Brown University and her professor there was none other than Andries van Dam.

Oral history videos and an interview transcript can be found at
the IBM Fellows site. Can't link the videos directly, so you'll have to go there. The 'work and live balance video', which seems to be one of the issues she's interested in, is especially interesting. A world wide thing that.

Yet another topic of her interest, not surprisingly is WICS (women in computer science: One of the two initiatives that I'm looking at is the women in computer science issue. Okay, this has been an ongoing problem for a number of years. the number of women in computer science keeps declining. And we're trying to figure out why and what we can do about it. plink, nix    praise or blame!
 

19.01.2006, 06:46
Fran Allen
Fran Allen has made outstanding contributions to the field of programming languages for almost forty years, and her work has significantly influenced the wider computer science community.

Here is her entry at WITI (Women In Technology International) and there is text about her at IBM Research.

A historic presentation by her on the "partnership" of processors and compilers can be found there.

Her entry at the Computer History Museum says, she has developed several programming languages that have advanced the fields of computer science and optimization compiling. She helped create one of the first automatic debugging systems and, as a member of the Stretch/HARVEST project, developed an advanced code-breaking language known as Alpha. Vow!

Worked with Lynn Conway in the IBM ACS project.

On Jan 15 06 NWY (not wikipediaed yet).

Update: Fran Allen now has wikipedia entries in Cesky
Deutsch, Español, Français, Ivrit, Norsk (bokmål) and ???. Of course.

15.01.2006, 12:22
Krisztina Holly
M.I.T.'s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovations Executive Director

has turned an interest in engineering and an aptitude for marketing and entrepreneurship into an exceptionally diverse and rewarding career. Recently taking on the role of executive director of MIT's Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation [2002], Holly plans to share her knowledge of technology, product development, entrepreneurship and the corporate world with those preparing to enter these fields.
[ web.mit.edu ]

If u got time for only 1 read, try this Protocol of an interactive session with KH at Stanford.

It seems in '98, when she was at RiverRun Media she used Frontpage to prepare a site and as a personal tool. Amazing, what people let lie around on the web. I like this todo list and this unfinished history page.

An active member of the New England mountain bike community.

As of Jan 15 06 not yet wikipediaed. plink, nix    praise or blame!