Wonder Women in the Rude Boys' Paradise

Early Microsoft: Release 1.0

Back in the company's rude-boy days -- not so long ago -- Microsoft numbered a few hundred employees in a single building alongside Highway 520, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. In those heady days the rise of the programmer had spawned an odd, almost other-worldly culture, a universe parallel to the dominant world of work -- but with everything backward. In this digital workspace, all the manners, traits, and attributes that used to get you shunned in traditional society became badges of belonging. Bad clothes, bad hair, bad breath, bad complexion, bad manners -- were all suddenly good! It was geek liberation -- with stock options!

This was an intentionally impolite society, a true revenge of the nerds, and the only women in it were a few beleaguered English majors who'd been hired to edit technical manuals for products like Microsoft BASIC. Those uncomfortable women worked in one separate wing, fending off awkward visits from male programmers who, with a distinct lack of finesse, were looking for action.

A time capsule would have captured scenes such as these:

It's 1982. A 19-year-old programmer wearing a fringed leather jacket and glasses thicker than radial tires is asking Jan Allister, a 40-year-old female editor, for a date. "Listen," he says, "I was wondering if you wanted to come out tonight and watch my band play."

"For God's sake!" she explodes, "I'm married...and moreover, I'm old enough to be your mother!"

A long pause. He stands there with a blank uncomprehending stare. Is she telling the truth? Or does she just not want to go out with me?

It's 1985. Four young men are wheeling a huge cake on a table into a conference room on a Friday afternoon. They summon their coworkers, who file into the room. There are two women and fifteen geeks. The leader of the group begins a manic speech in praise of one of his team members. Suddenly the cake opens up and a woman clad in bra and panties jumps out and delivers a bump-and-grind performance on top of the table. The two women workers slink into a corner of the room, acutely embarrassed.

It's 1990. Abigail Riblet, a woman hired to edit science articles in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia, learns what it's like to be "discovered" by geeks. Riblet, who happens to look like a brunette version of Botticelli's Venus, spends her first days on the job anchored to her desk, fending off a constant stream of developers who come stumbling into her office, clumsily asking her out.

One night Riblet's friends are alarmed to hear her shouting from her office: "Don't you ever talk about anything but sex?!" They rush to her office door to see Riblet glaring angrily into her computer monitor. Perched on a corner of her desk is an archetypal geek, looking both embarrassed and incapable of embarrassment. What exactly was it that he'd said that was so wrong?

It's 1993. Two male software developers in T-shirts and shorts decide to take a recreation break. They position themselves outside the office of a female graphic designer and pepper her closed door with nerf balls fired from a gun. They continue the assault relentlessly, while the woman sits at her desk inside the office, sobbing.

Finally it's 1995. Two men and a woman are standing in a hallway, going over a technical problem related to multimedia authoring. The woman, Libby Dunkin, a technical evangelist, is wearing a ragged red sweater and blue jeans. Her hair appears not to have been combed for a few days. She asks the man facing her a series of technical questions. Instead of responding to her, the man looks at the man standing next to Dunkin and says, "Okay, should I contact your assistant here when we're ready to go ahead?"

The man next to Dunkin explodes: "You dumb fuck! She's my manager!"

"He got really righteous about it," Dunkin later says, with an indulgent laugh. "I didn't have to do a thing." Having been at Microsoft for nearly eight years, Dunkin's seen the change that's come over the company. "It's gone so far now that if someone even thinks they've said something that offends you, they catch themselves and start apologizing before you have a chance to say anything."