Old techies had every sort of virtuous and terrible sort among them, no question about it. And, absolutely, some of the oldest were women. Indeed the oldest techie team of all time (Lovelace & Babbage) have an even 50/50 gender split.
However, the reasoning behind why computers should serve the user is orthogonal to the feminism or chauvinism or, God help us, fascism of the people who espoused what Steven Levy calls the “hacker ethic.” It’s a strange tech-focused ideology and is compatible with a surprisingly wide range of political and ideological positions. Some of the people who espouse it are terrible, horrible, and vile but… they think you should own and control your own data processing devices.
So, while some of the people who were Ye Olde Techies may have had any amount of feminist analysis at their beck and call, their position vis-a-vis user control of computers would have been exactly the same of some disgustingly reactionary Ye Olde Techie or some who was entirely ignorant of the existence of feminism and the reaction to it.
Hence why I said: ‘without benefit of.’ It’s not an erasure, so much as a nod to the fundamental weirdness of that long-ago community(?).
