Status Updates From Programmed Inequality: How ...

Also: the dream of propping up and invigorating the British colonial vision through computing is WILD. The government orchestrated mergers between British computing companies and gave them secret preferential contracts. The hope was to drum up an export market for British computing and stave off IBM's increasing market share.

"Yet the department used these same workers, who were judged inadequate for promotion, to indefinitely cover vacant higher executive officer posts. General aptitude was a highly gendered construct. In everything but name, these women were in fact the computer experts that the government was desperately seeking to hire. Gender and class, much more than skill, determined workers’ roles in the computing hierarchy."

Great note here about how computer history narratives tend to focus on remarkable individuals and "reflexively and unconsciously privilege those with the most power and implicitly endorse an ahistorical fiction of technological meritocracy"