Before Steve Jobs put a personal computer in your hands; before Larry Page and Sergey Brin put any answer at your fingertips; before Mark Zuckerberg connected you to your long-lost friends, female visionaries were at the vanguard of the technology you love (and love to hate).

VICE futures editor and lead singer of the band YACHT Claire Evans presents the first social history of women and the internet. These innovators, concentrating where computers have made our lives better, richer, and more connected, are the unsung heroes of network culture.

Join the ranks of women who have pioneered technology, like Ada Lovelace, the tortured, imaginative daughter of Lord Byron, who wrote the first program for a mechanical computer. Grace Hopper, a navy admiral and mathematician created machine-independent programming languages. Stacy Horn ran one of the Internet’s earliest social networks, Echo, out of her Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. To say nothing of database poets, desktop thespians, cyber-ingenues, glass ceiling-shattering entrepreneurs, and the self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley.”

Evans shines a light on these bright minds whom history forgot, showing us how women have always pushed technology forward and will continue to shape our world in powerful ways that we can no longer ignore.