For more than 40 years, standard black pens have cluttered the desks of thousands of federal employees, hung on a chain at post offices across the country and slipped into the pockets of countless military personnel. Yet few have realized that this government-issue pen has a history to rival that of any monument.

As the early adopters among us massage their new iPads this weekend, they might want to hearken back to when a computer was a room, and the only thing you touched was a punch-card. Here are our favorite stories from the computer’s early days:

Use of metrics to refine techniques and improve results. "After Apgar, obstetricians decided that they needed a simpler, more predictable way to intervene when a laboring mother ran into trouble. They found it in the Cesarean section."

for your enlightenment here's a kinda scary list, a selection of the CS/IT Things which are currently run by or were Invented (not just worked on, but created) by women

BBC Story on Nuclear Weapon Controls

Commentary on Sarah Palin and her book