The offers had come in earlier that day. Paulina Borsook, 72, allowed herself a flash of excitement before returning to the question of what had ruined her life. “I don’t know what to make of it,” she said as the car drove her to lunch. Borsook’s home, a cold, color-scheme basement unit, reflected her isolation and the struggles of her career, which had abruptly vanished after her book, Cyberselfish, was published in 2000. In the years that followed, editors stopped taking her calls, and she was left wondering if she had been blacklisted or if her career had been ruined by something as depressingly commonplace as sexism.

When Borsook and I first met, in December of last year, she was fully in the midst of a resuscitation. A social media post here, another one over there, celebrated tech critics like Gil Durán of The Nerd Reich exhumed her book and waved it around as proof that some people had seen where things were headed. Borsook was christened a prophet, unappreciated in her time but uniquely fitted to ours. Publishers were now keen to get the book back in circulation, and the offers were validation. But as she told me, “I don’t know how to think about myself anymore.”

In 1960s America, Dick Pick was a software developer for a military contractor during the Vietnam War. Alongside his business partner, Don Nelson, he came up with a database operating system called GIRLS, which was put to commercial use. The story goes that the Army needed a way to track spare parts for Lockheed’s Cheyenne attack helicopter. It’s a story that encapsulates the tech industry’s flirtatious past and its lasting impact on Paulina Borsook’s career.

Borsook’s story is a reminder that the tech industry, in its early days, was not just about innovation and progress, but also about the people who made it possible, and the consequences of their work. It’s a story that highlights the importance of diversifying the tech industry and ensuring that the voices of those who saw the future clearly are heard.