Everyone in tech knows Ada Lovelace. Most people have heard of Grace Hopper. But the history of technology is full of women whose contributions were just as foundational — and whose names most people couldn't tell you without Googling.
This isn't a list of honorable mentions. These are women who invented core technologies, wrote code that changed the world, and built infrastructure that billions of people depend on every single day — often without credit, often without recognition, and in many cases while navigating institutions that actively worked against them.
Some of these names you'll recognize. Most you probably won't. All of them deserve to be known.
The ones you've probably heard of — and what you might not know about them
Ada Lovelace — the first programmer, 1815–1852
Ada Lovelace wrote the world's first algorithm in the 1840s — intended for Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was never actually built. What made Ada remarkable wasn't just that she understood the machine. It's that she understood what machines could become, a century before anyone else did. She wrote that the Engine could be used to compose music, manipulate symbols, and solve problems far beyond pure mathematics. She was describing a general-purpose computer in 1843. The first one wasn't built until 1945.
What most people don't know: Ada's notes on the Analytical Engine are three times longer than the paper she was supposedly just translating. She wasn't transcribing someone else's ideas. She was extending them into entirely new territory.
Grace Hopper — the compiler pioneer, 1906–1992
Grace Hopper invented the compiler — the program that translates human-readable code into machine language. Before Grace, programming meant writing directly in machine code, which was slow, error-prone, and inaccessible to most people. Her invention made programming languages possible. Without her, there is no COBOL, no FORTRAN, and arguably no software industry as we know it.
What most people don't know: Grace was still actively working at 79 years old, retired from the US Navy as a rear admiral, and spent her final years traveling to universities and companies talking to young people about computers. She kept a clock on her wall that ran counterclockwise — to remind people that "the most dangerous phrase in the language is we've always done it this way."
The ones who built the internet — literally
Radia Perlman — the mother of the internet, 1951–present
Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) in 1985 — the algorithm that makes it possible for large networks to function without creating infinite loops of data. Without STP, the modern internet as we know it couldn't exist. Every large-scale network in the world, from corporate data centers to the infrastructure that runs cloud computing, relies on a concept Radia figured out in a few weeks and wrote up in a paper most people have never read.
She's also contributed to network security, routing protocols, and PKI infrastructure — the system that makes encrypted web connections possible. She holds over 100 patents. She dislikes being called "the mother of the internet" because she thinks it overstates any one person's contribution to a collaborative field. That attitude is itself kind of remarkable.
Elizabeth Feinler — the woman who ran the internet's address book, 1931–present
Before DNS existed — before your browser could automatically find a website by typing its name — someone had to maintain a list of every computer on the internet and its address. That someone was Elizabeth Feinler, who ran the Network Information Center (NIC) at Stanford Research Institute from 1972 to 1989.
Her team maintained the ARPANET directory, managed the first domain name system, and established the naming conventions we still use today — .com, .gov, .edu, .mil, .org. The next time you type a URL, you're using a system Elizabeth Feinler's team designed. Her office also handled all queries by phone and email, which in the early days of the internet meant her team was essentially the help desk for the entire network.
The ones who put humans in space
Katherine Johnson — the human computer, 1918–2020
Katherine Johnson calculated the orbital mechanics for John Glenn's Friendship 7 mission in 1962 — and Glenn himself refused to fly until she personally verified the electronic computer's calculations. Her work was foundational to the Apollo program. She calculated the trajectory for the Apollo 11 mission that put the first humans on the moon.
What most people don't know: Katherine worked at NASA for 33 years, during which she co-authored 26 scientific papers. She was working in an era of both racial segregation and gender discrimination — she had to fight to attend meetings that were considered "men only," and early in her career worked in a segregated computing pool. She kept showing up anyway, kept doing the work, and kept being indispensable.
Annie Easley — the rocket scientist who didn't make the history books, 1933–2011
Annie Easley worked at NASA for 34 years as a computer scientist and mathematician. She developed code for the Centaur rocket — the high-energy upper stage that has launched dozens of missions including the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn and the New Horizons probe to Pluto. She was also one of the first African American employees at NASA's Lewis Research Center and spent part of her career helping colleagues pursue education through outreach programs.
You've probably never heard her name. That's exactly the problem this article is trying to fix.
The ones whose work is in your pocket right now
Sophie Wilson — the architect of the chip in almost every smartphone, 1957–present
Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set for the ARM processor in 1985, working at Acorn Computers. The ARM architecture is now the most widely used processor architecture in the world — it powers iPhones, Android phones, tablets, smartwatches, and an enormous range of embedded systems. Estimates suggest there are over 200 billion ARM-based chips in use globally.
Every time you unlock your phone, you're interacting with architecture Sophie Wilson designed. Most people in tech don't know her name. Most people outside tech have never heard of her at all.
Lynn Conway — the engineer who reinvented chip design, 1938–2024
Lynn Conway developed a set of design rules in the late 1970s that transformed how microchips are designed and manufactured. Working at Xerox PARC, she co-authored "Introduction to VLSI Systems" with Carver Mead — a textbook that became the foundation for an entire generation of chip designers and is still referenced today. Her work made it possible to design complex chips efficiently, which directly enabled the personal computer revolution.
What makes her story particularly complicated: Lynn was fired from IBM in 1968 after coming out as transgender, losing her job, her career history, and her professional identity in a single moment. She rebuilt her career from scratch, eventually making contributions that helped shape the modern semiconductor industry — contributions she couldn't publicly claim for decades. She came out publicly in 1999. She spent her later years advocating for transgender rights and visibility in STEM.
The ones who made software human
Margaret Hamilton — the engineer who coined "software engineering," 1936–present
Margaret Hamilton led the software engineering division at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory and developed the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions. During the Apollo 11 mission, her software detected an error three minutes before lunar landing and executed a recovery that allowed the mission to continue. Without that error-handling code, the mission would have been aborted.
She also coined the term "software engineering" — arguing that software development deserved to be treated with the same rigor and discipline as other engineering fields, at a time when most people in the industry didn't think of it that way. She was right. The entire modern software industry is built on that idea.
Hedy Lamarr — the inventor Hollywood forgot, 1914–2000
Hedy Lamarr was one of the most famous actresses of the 1940s. She was also a self-taught inventor who co-developed frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during World War II — a method of transmitting signals by rapidly switching between frequencies to prevent jamming. She patented it in 1942. The patent expired before the technology became commercially viable, so she never made money from it.
The same principle she developed is the foundation of modern Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. The invisible infrastructure of the connected world runs on an idea a Hollywood actress figured out in her spare time. She received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, just three years before she died. Better late than never — but not by much.
The ones rewriting the future right now
The pioneers above built the foundation. The women working in tech today are building everything on top of it — in AI research, cybersecurity, quantum computing, open source software, and fields that didn't exist a decade ago.
Fei-Fei Li co-created ImageNet, the dataset that sparked the modern deep learning revolution. Safra Catz has led Oracle as CEO since 2014. Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code, which has reached over 500,000 young women across the US. Kimberly Bryant founded Black Girls Code. Joy Buolamwini's research exposed racial and gender bias in facial recognition systems used by governments and corporations worldwide.
The list keeps going. It always has. The difference now is that more of these names are being written down.
Why this matters beyond the history lesson
Knowing these names matters for a few reasons that have nothing to do with nostalgia.
It matters because representation shapes what people believe is possible. A young woman who knows that the architecture in her phone was designed by Sophie Wilson, that the internet's backbone was built by Radia Perlman, that the code that put humans on the moon was written by Margaret Hamilton — she has a different relationship with what's achievable than one who doesn't.
It matters because history has a way of defaulting to the most visible story, and the most visible story has rarely been the complete one. The women on this list didn't fail to get credit because their work was less significant. They didn't get credit because the systems around them weren't designed to give it to them. Correcting that record is worth doing.
And it matters because the future of technology is being built right now, by people whose names we don't know yet. Some of them are reading this article. Some of them are in classrooms, or hackathons, or writing their first line of code in a language Grace Hopper made possible, on a chip Sophie Wilson designed, connected to a network Radia Perlman made stable.
That's worth knowing.
The Women in Tech collection at Code Crushes
At Code Crushes, the Women in Tech collection was built to celebrate exactly this legacy — the pioneers, the builders, and the women writing the next chapter right now.
Deby, one of the brand's two mascot characters, is at the center of every design in the collection. Curious, confident, and completely uninterested in proving herself to anyone. She honors the women who came before and celebrates the ones still showing up every day — in engineering teams, in research labs, in CS classrooms, in home offices at midnight.
If you're shopping for yourself, for a woman in tech you admire, or for the next generation of builders — this collection was made with them in mind.
Shop the Women in Tech Collection →
The record is still being written
History has always been built by more people than it remembers. The women on this list are proof of that — and so are the thousands of others whose names didn't make it into this article, or any article, because the systems that record history weren't paying attention.
That's changing. Slowly, imperfectly, but it's changing. And every name we learn, every contribution we acknowledge, every story we tell correctly — that's part of how it changes.
Learn the names. Tell the stories. Wear the collection.