Mary Ann Horton

Mary Ann Horton is a computer scientist and one of the pioneers of Usenet and the early Internet. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her doctorate in 1981, she contributed to Berkeley UNIX, including the vi editor and the terminfo, termcap and curses terminal libraries, and wrote uuencode, the first widely used tool for sending binary files as email attachments. She brought Usenet to Berkeley in 1980, co-designed the B News software with Matt Glickman, and later led the growth of Usenet while working at Bell Labs, where she recruited the Usenet backbone and moderated the first moderated newsgroup. She also championed Internet domain names in place of bang path email addresses and started the UUCP Mapping Project. Later in her career she became an educator and advocate for transgender inclusion in the workplace.