This program is designed to appeal to girls, who, are told, are less eager to use computers than their male classmates. The heroine, Jenny, becomes separated from the wagon team with which she’s going west in the summer of 1842, and is faced with some challenging problems: how to build a lean-to for the winter, how to gather food and keep warm, how to watch out for dangerous animals.

The Internet Archive has saved episodes from The Computer Chronicles, a popular show that featured computer software. An entire episode is devoted to Women in Computing, and is definitely worth checking out. Elizabeth Scott of Rhiannon Software (who helped create and released Jenny of the Prairie) is among the several female guests on the show. The ridiculous part of the episode isn’t the interviews of these women (which are fantastic and very insightful), but the closing remarks by Paul Schindler near the end of the episode. He says the following:

Frankly, it makes me as mad as hell to see how badly women are underused in the computer business. I think it should make you mad too, whether you’re a man or a woman – let me tell you why. If you’re a woman, you should be mad because the accident of your birth put you at a permanent disadvantage in the computer business.

While the intent of the show was to promote equal opportunities for women and men in computing, the episode is extremely disingenuous. Paul’s closing remark, coupled with the fact that all the hosts are male clearly shows the gender barriers that existed in the 80′s for women in computing. The only female from The Computer Chronicles is a female anchor reading the weekly news off a teleprompter, unlike all the other male hosts on the show.