The INQUIRER Top Five Women In Tech

IN A FINE piece for The Grauniad this week, Peter Judge reminded us that Hedy Lamarr was not only a great Hollywood star but also a co-inventor of spread spectrum technology. Not a common combination when you happen to think about it.

They don't make them like La Lamarr any longer, more's the pity. She had a 28-year career in the pictures and left her first arms-magnate husband by drugging her maid and donning her outfit. Undeterred, she married a further five times. She was the subject of a novel and an Andy Warhol movie and she liked a lawsuit, even suing Corel for using her image in CorelDraw packaging.

She was quoted as saying: "Films have a certain place in a certain time period. Technology is forever." She was also the first woman to bare her breasts and simulate an orgasm on the silver screen, although not at the same time.

Hedy Lamarr was beautiful, intelligent and successful. She took on the world and shook it down to make it her own, didn't pussyfoot around or take any prisoners. She died in January, 2000. I never met her but I still carry a torch for her.

There was only one Hedy Lamarr but there have been lots of great women technology pioneers. Here's a list of five of them, in the certain knowledge you're going to tell us more.

5 Anita Borg, born 1949, made a major contribution to the role of women in modern computing. After a career in computing, including a long stint at Digital, Borg founded the Institute for Women and Technology.

4 Kim Polese. Once a rising star at Sun, Polese made her name in the dot-com era when she set up Marimba, an early proponent of internet push software. She now runs SpikeSource, a company that certifies stacks of open-source programs.

3 Diane Greene might well be the most important woman in IT today. As founder and CEO of VMware she runs what is possibly the biggest business technology success story of the decade so far. The MIT graduate previously worked at firms including Sybase, SGI and Tandem. As a child, she made cash in a more humble way, fishing for crabs in Maryland and selling them for a few dollars each.

2 Ada Lovelace had an auspicious start to life as she was born, in 1815, the only legitimate child of the great Romantic poet, "mad, bad and dangerous to know" Lord Byron. She translated an article on Babbage's adding machine, appending notes that some say are the basis for the first ever computing program. Tragically, science, or at least the misapplication of science, killed her. She died aged 36 through a blood letting treatment for her cancer. Her father had died through the same treatment.

1 Grace Hopper was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy and played a critical role in the development of Cobol and the standardisation of this and other languages. Such was the male domination of the fledgling industry that she was named "man of the year" by the Data Processing Management Association in 1969. µ