Excerpts from: Things Can Break, Tech Women Crashing Computers and Preconceptions- Aileen Derieg. https://transversal.at/transversal/0707/derieg/en
“ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange) was founded at the end of the nineties in a squatted building in Amsterdam explicitly to meet a growing need for free access and control over the tools: “ASCII is a non-profit internetworkspace running on open source software. We try to show that there’s more than just M$ Windows and we try to convince our fellow activists that using software made by the biggest multi-national corporation in the world must be bad. ASCII started in 1999 in a squatted building on the Herengracht. Our main goal in that time was to get all the squatters an email address. Nowadays, using email and the web is so common that we could choose new goals: We provide internet in action camps, host websites for organisations that were not welcome elsewhere and try to facilitate the use of internet by activists. […] We feel the Internet should be accessible to anyone and that censorship sucks. Infringement on free speech, surfers’ privacy and over-commercialization of the net are major problems already. At this rate the net will soon be one huge billboard where multinational companies provide the world with good, clean family fun. Not if we can help it! We hope the subversive elements of the world will continue to infiltrate the net.” The squatter scene in Amsterdam at that time was clearly in need of its own Internet cafe, and ASCII quickly became a popular place to check email, meet like-minded people and generally hang out, and – most importantly – for learning, developing and practicing useful technical skills.”
“Because they shared the goals and ideals of ASCII and because these goals and ideals were important to them, the women who were becoming frustrated by a lack of the kind of encouragement propagated in Henson’s HOWTO did not give up and leave, but decided in the spirit of Free Software to modify the organization to suit their own needs. They began meeting purposely as women in a subgroup to share the skills they had acquired with one another and to help and encourage one another to further develop their knowledge and technical skills. A special focus from the start was on hardware: “Hardware is tangible, real and visible. It’s easy to work with, accessible. Everyone can do it, you don’t need any schooling or experience to take it apart and put it back together again. Working with hardware is fun and sparks the ‘eureka’ feeling in nearly everyone that has followed one of our Hardware Courses! Knowing computer hardware, being able to picture the devices and put life into the jargon is essential to continued growth in ICT.” The idea caught on and soon started attracting more women, the small group of ASCII women developed a kind of group identity, and in November 1999 they gave themselves a name: the Gender Changer Academy.”
