Women Reshaping the Digital Landscape

JoAnn Napier, Denise Shortt & Emma Smith
(Harper Collins, 2000)

BOOK EXCERPT –
As a computer journalist, Catherine Warren spent half a decade or so chasing down technology stories, attending trade shows, interviewing tech creators and tech users, in the U.S. and beyond.

“Combining technology and publishing, science and writing, was a natural extension of my life,” says Warren, who has been recognized by publications and national organizations as a new media pioneer. She wrote her master’s thesis on the scientific and artistic origins of multimedia, founded the European user magazines for Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Unisys, was team and operations planner for Microsoft’s multimedia science encyclopedia (which evolved into Encarta), and served variously as editor or publisher of more than 25 books and magazine series on science and computing.

While doing her undergraduate degree in physics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, back in the early 1980s, she learned to program in Unix and Pascal, and was one of the first college students to test the Apple “Lisa” – the early Mac. Catherine moved on to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1985 for her Masters in Science in science writing. “For me, computers were the link to a whole world of science and technology reporting. As a computer journalist, I was like the ‘paparazzo’ – and the technology was the celebrity.” “When I was a graduate student at Columbia University, wanting to write my thesis on the infancy of multimedia in 1984, I was told ‘There’s no story there’. Well, not only was there a story, but this story turned out to be one of the biggest stories of the latter half of the century! I went ahead and wrote the story. Since then, I’ve kept my nose for news and for new media innovation.”