According to http://findingada.com,

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines.

So, I admit I didn’t do a TON of research, but I wanted to choose a female pioneer in informatics. After a little bit of Googling, I decided on Ruth Dayhoff.

The National Library of Medicine has a great biography about Ruth Dayhoff as part of their “Changing the Face of Medicine” exhibition about women physicians.

She describes how she got informatics, saying

“I was interested in [computers, medicine, and biology] as I was growing up, and I had a choice whether to study computer science or go to medical school. So I decided to go to medical school to better understand not only the treatment of patients but the actions and knowledge of physicians…However, in the end, after completing a residency in clinical pathology, I decided that I could contribute the most by bringing computer applications to medicine.”

I think this describes how most members of the informatics community got to where they are today – I know that’s how I got into it, only I skipped the medical school step and got into a PhD program (which wasn’t an option back in those days).

Ruth Dayhoff is most well-known for her contributions to the MUMPS language and VistA (the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture).

When asked how she makes a difference, Ruth Dayhoff responded

“I make a difference through my work in developing a multimedia patient record that can provide integrated information to physicians quickly and efficiently so medical decisions can be made optimally. Medicine is an information intensive profession, and this system changes the way medicine is practiced.”

Here’s to Ruth Dayhoff and the other amazing women in Informatics and technology!

This week’s blog challenge is to blog about your computer setup as it was “then” in the early days of your computer life, and how it is now, in your modern technology life.

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When I was in the fourth grade, all I wanted for Christmas was my own computer. I must have been on the “nice” list that year, because Santa did in fact bring me a computer! For the time, it was pretty awesome. I don’t remember the specs exactly, but most importantly, it had a modem! I’m not sure why my parents thought this was a good idea. When the first phone bill arrived, my days of spending hours on Prodigy were over. Eventually, phone companies and ISPs stopped charging by the minute, and we made the move from Prodigy to AOL. I eventually discovered member home pages on AOL, and I made my first website. Unhappy with the limited options that the AOL WYSIWYG service provided, I began to pick up some HTML, and over the next several years, I developed some very ridiculous sites.

First, here are some pictures I found that were taken of my computer during high school:
  

When I went to college, I switched to a laptop, which had some amusing video card problems. In particular, it liked to switch into “big mode,” or 640×480 resoultion.

I added a desktop to my collection during college, and later got a new laptop. When I started graduate school two years ago, my setup looked like this (it’s hard to tell, but there is quite a mess of wires):

About a year and a half ago, I switched from the Dell laptop to my Thinkpad, which I love!

We have since added a second monitor to the desktop setup, though the computer is currently in a phase of repair/upgrade. However, most of my time is spent on my desktop at work (also a dual-monitor setup) or on my laptop at home.

Now that I’ve described the computer setup, I think it will be fun to show some of the “masterpieces” that I created with them! Through the Internet Archive, I’ve found some broken versions of several of my old sites:

• Alli’s Hangout – This is the oldest site of mine that I have found. At some point I migrated away from AOL’s hosting to various free hosting services. Alli’s Hangout included everything that a “cool” site needed at the time – web awards, web pets for adoption, webrings, a guestbook, midi background music, and random pages about things that I enjoyed at the time. I even made several sites for my friends, which you can find links for on the site (in particular, Kristen, Taryn, and Courtney)
• allison.8m.com – In high school, I graduated from Alli’s Hangout to allison.8m.com. Basically, I wanted a cool URL, and this service provided URLs like yourusername.afewshortcharacters.com – hence, allison.8m.com. This site was mostly about pictures, since I had developed a habit of taking and scanning large numbers of pictures. La Casa Real and Mock Trial are sites I made for class projects, and the TIP site includes pictures from my summer at the Duke TIP program.
• www.allison-beck.com – My first domain! This site went through several versions. The biggest changes included the original look, the Baylor look, the pastel look, and the red look. This site focused on pictures and blogging, and I kept up with the site until 6 months ago, when I got married and eventually let the domain expire.
• www.allisonmccoy.com – Clearly you’ve found this one by now! While my new site (with the new name) is similar to allison-beck.com in that I’m keeping a blog and sharing pictures, I’m trying to keep it more active and interesting. In particular, I hope to include content about more than just me. I want people who don’t even care about me that much to enjoy visiting my site.

Now that I’m done reminiscing, I’d be curious to see if others have comments or posts of their own to share!