[1] Her father had a small advertising agency and her mother, Ruth H. Ewing, was a high school math teacher and homemaker.
Following her graduation, she took chemistry classes at Columbia University, but ultimately decided that a career in physical therapy had little appeal.
[3] Hardy worked on some of the first time-sharing systems and computer networks, used by a variety of corporations and government agencies.
[7] Though Hardy was solely responsible for the writing the code for Tymshare's time-sharing product, many of her male colleagues assumed her husband had written the OS.
It wasn't until she was in the hospital giving birth to her first child, and her coworkers encountered problems that they did not know how to fix, that they began to defer to her as the expert on the system she had written.
While at IBM, at one point Hardy learned that she was being paid less than one-half of the salary of the lowest ranked man who reported to her.