Ellen Ullman

A self-taught programmer who moved to San Francisco in the 1970s and became involved in then-nascent Silicon Valley—“people I knew at that time were wild, outside the mainstream,” she later recalled, describing those in the industry today as dressed “all in business casual”—Ellen Ullman published her first book, Close to the Machine, in 1997. In 2017, as the FCC prepared to end net neutrality (the U.S. policy requiring internet providers to treat all data equally), Ullman said the change would make the “internet so severely compromised as to be unrecognizable to my generation.”