how did you first get into computing?
TRANSCRIPT
How did you first get into computing?The route to a computing career is often circuitous.
This was especially true in the 1950s and 1960s, when for-mal credentials were scarce. As part of my ongoingresearch on the history of women in computing, I con-ducted oral history interviews with pioneers in the field,during which I asked about their first encounters withcomputers. The excerpts I include here evoke the intel-lectual and practical appeal of computing for thesewomen, as well as its challenges.
Although individual experiences varied, a commonthread in these stories is that women’s opportunities wereconstrained by gender stereotypes, outright discrimina-tion, and the demands of marriage and family. At thesame time, computing was a relatively welcoming fieldfor women, and it offered them a rare chance to put theirtechnical abilities to work. Women’s first experienceswith computers often led to a challenging, enjoyable, andfinancially rewarding career.
Lucy SlaterLucy Slater received PhDs in mathematics from both theUniversity of London and Cambridge University. She worked atCambridge University for 30 years, using the EDSAC and othercomputers.
In 1947, I was studying mathematics at the Universityof London. At that time, the Schroedinger equation wasthe great thing—that was the solutions of the hydrogenatom. You couldn’t calculate it; it was taking theAmericans years to calculate even a tiny little equation.They were letting off those early atomic weapons with-out any knowledge about how big a bang it was going tomake! Why they didn’t blow up half of America is a mys-tery. And they were already considering the hydrogenbomb, yet they couldn’t solve the hydrogen equations. Imanaged to produce some theoretical solutions of thehydrogen equation, and some years later, I contributed athick chapter to the Handbook of Mathematical Functions.In London, I ran into Eric Mutch, who told me about thismachine they were going to build at Cambridge. Ithought, “That’s a good idea,” because doing sums wasthe great obstacle that was holding everything up. I want-ed to go to Cambridge, and I had a year’s grant spare, so Iwent in 1951. It was just curiosity; there wasn’t anythingelse driving me except wanting to get real numbers intothese theoretical equations—before somebody blew theworld up. I was doing the calculations of the
Schroedinger Equation solutions and, in particular, theconfluent hypergeometric functions.
EDSAC I was a rather recalcitrant sort of computer.Sometimes the valves rose up in their seats and got loose,overheating. So you just gave it a hearty kick, and some-times that got it going again. We also had a lot of troublewith things setting on fire because the engineers keptjoining bits on without calculating whether there wereany power supplies available to feed these things. Butthey were good times, and we had a lot of fun. There wasthat feeling that we were doing something new. I imag-ine the astronauts felt the same—being on unknown ter-ritory, and not knowing what’s going to happen next.That was the peak of my life.
Mary Lee Berners-LeeMary Lee Berners-Lee received a degree in mathematics fromBirmingham University. She was one of the early programmersfor the Ferranti Mark I computer. Her son Tim Berners-Lee is thecreator of the World Wide Web.
After getting a university degree in mathematics, Iwent to Australia for three years to work at the observa-tory at Canberra, then returned to the UK in 1950. I waswondering what to do, and I saw an ad in Nature saying,“Mathematicians wanted to work on a digital computer.”I went to the Birmingham Reference Library to find outwhat a digital computer was and spent two days readingup on it, finding it very interesting. I applied for the job atFerranti, went for an interview, and because I knew some-thing about computers, I could ask intelligent ques-tions—and this must have increased my initial salary bya factor of about a third. When I got there, it was thor-oughly enjoyable.
Manchester University had built the computer, andFerranti offered to make a properly engineered commer-cial version. They were building the first one for the uni-versity itself—the Ferranti Mark 1—with a view to sellingothers afterward. Young people were recruited. It was agreat team, very exciting.
We programmed in machine code, of course; therewasn’t anything else. One of the things I did was simul-taneous equations—40, in fact. At that time, it wasunthinkable to be able to solve 40 simultaneous equa-tions. The aircraft industry was one of the big applica-tions, working out the stresses along the wings and so on.
One of the things that was really interesting was thefight for women’s rights. We discovered that the men
AnecdotesAnne Fitzpatrick, EditorLos Alamos National Laboratory
78 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
were getting paid more. Ferranti was a paternalfirm, and they were horrified that young grad-uates did something so unprofessional as to dis-cuss with one another what they earned. Theirargument was that if they knew that Joe Bloggshad a sick wife and real trouble, then theycould quietly give him more—providednobody talked about their salaries—and thaton the whole, men would have to support awife and children so they needed more moneythan the women. Well, this went nowhere withthe professional women. I was the person whowas selected to talk to management and makethe case, and we won. All the women got raises,to be equal with the men.
Jean SammetJean Sammet led the committee that developed theCobol language in 1959. While working at IBM in theearly 1960s, she developed Formac, an early languagefor manipulating algebraic expressions, which earnedher the IBM Outstanding Contribution Award. She isthe author of Programming Languages: History andFundamentals. In 1974, Sammet became the firstwoman elected president of the ACM.
I was a graduate student in the MathDepartment at the University of Illinois from1948 to 1951. Over in the EngineeringDepartment, they were building what becameknown as the ILLIAC, one of the early elec-tronic digital computers. I think it is impossi-ble to describe the amount of contempt that Iand my fellow mathematician graduate stu-dents had for that. We considered that one stepabove garbage collecting. That was practicalstuff; not only was it dull, we felt, but demean-ing to pure mathematicians. None of us weregoing to have any part of it.
In the fall of 1951, I went to work at theMetropolitan Life Insurance Company. Theysent us to classes on punch-card equipment,and to my complete and utter astonishment, Iloved it.
My next job was at Sperry Gyroscope onLong Island. One day my manager came overto me and said, “By the way, we’re building adigital computer. Do you want to be our pro-grammer?” I asked the obvious question:“What is a programmer?” And he said, “I don’tknow, but I know we need one!” So I thought,“Well, that punch-card stuff was fascinating. Ishould at least give this a try.” So I became theprogrammer. No books, no manuals, noinstructions, no nothing—and engineers whosomehow thought that the machine was goingto run itself and didn’t want a programmer.
The computer was called Speedac, for
speedy digital automatic computer. But therewere programs that were simply too large forthe computer that we had; they just took toomuch time or too much memory. Around thattime, Sperry Gyroscope, at the top level, wasgetting involved with Remington-Rand, whichthen led to a merger. That meant we had someaccess to Remington-Rand Univac, and lo andbehold, that’s when I met Grace Hopper andher group. They had developed some scientificprograms and some scientific languages thatwere a lot easier to use than the basic codingthat we did on Speedac, which wasn’t evensymbolic assembly code; it was absoluteaddresses. We would work during the day, andthen we’d go into Manhattan, take a fiveo’clock train to Philadelphia, maybe eat a sand-wich on the way, and we would work on theseUnivac I machines until 10:30 p.m. or 11:00p.m. Then, we’d catch the last train back fromPhiladelphia to Manhattan. It was the only wayto get the work done.
Dame Stephanie ShirleyStephanie (“Steve”) Shirley founded an early soft-ware company, Freelance Programmers Limited, in1962. She headed the company for 40 years, duringwhich time it grew into a multibillion-dollar enter-prise called FI Group.
My first job, in 1951, was at the Post OfficeResearch Station at Dollis Hill in London, whichis a good, well-known research establishment. Iwas there for eight years. I started as a glorifiedmathematical clerk, punching desk calculatorcomptometers, and I learned about algebras,correlations, statistics—background training fora mathematician. I loved mathematics.Suddenly computers came on the scene, and bythe nature of what I was doing, I immediatelyknew that that’s what I wanted to do.
I left the Post Office Research Station when Imarried, and I applied for a job with a computercompany. I’d worked on many computers bythat time, not only using computers to solveproblems but also designing computers. Thesewere special-purpose computers concerned withthe first electronic telephone exchange,Highgate Woods in north London, and I waswriting software to check the hardware. I’d donefairly major computer projects for that time, andI had become a founding member of the BritishComputer Society. I became its president from1989 to 1990—the first woman president.
I left the Post Office Research Station andjoined ICL for an important 18 months in mycareer. It was my first proper management job;I had a small team in software, and I had a lot
October–December 2003 79
of responsibility for testing out the ICT 1301.Then, I hit what we now call the glass ceiling.I realized that even in this excellent company, Iwas not going to get anywhere, and like manywomen, I set up my own company to circum-vent the gender issues that were becomingapparent in my career.
I had this idea that software was much moreimportant than anybody else seemed to real-ize—more important than hardware and moreinteresting as well. I also thought that therewere women as well as me who wanted to workin a different way. There were women at thattime with decent math degrees (as wererequired for software) for the first time lookingaround for jobs. We didn’t know how wonder-ful the industry was going to be. It was just soexciting, we didn’t look further than the cur-rent project. “How were we going to do this?How were we going to do that?” It was a greattime and very creative.
Ruzena BajcsyRuzena Bajcsy grew up in communist Czechoslovakia.She was a member of the Computer Science faculty atthe University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 2001 andfounded its General Robotics and Active SensoryPerception (Grasp) Laboratory. She is an IEEE Fellowand a member of the National Academy ofEngineering. Bajcsy is currently Director of the Centerfor Information Technology Research in the Interest ofSociety at the University of California, Berkeley.
I entered university in 1952. In communistcountries in those days, if you studied mathe-matics, the only job available was being ateacher. The condition for being a teacher,however, was that you had to comply to thegovernment official ideology, which wasMarxism and Leninism. I wasn’t ready to sub-scribe to that, so I decided to look for the engi-neering profession that was the mostmathematically inclined, which was electricalengineering. I enrolled in electrical engineeringat the Slovak Technical University, and I got mymaster’s degree in 1957.
Just before I finished, in 1956, there was alittle political thaw in Czechoslovakia. Therewas a student meeting where I spoke about thegreat tradition of Czechoslovak education, thatwe shouldn’t follow the Russian model, andthat we should adhere to our own model. Thatgot me into such trouble that, although I hada doctoral fellowship in mathematics, after Ifinished my electrical engineering degree, I wascondemned as an enemy of the state based onthis speech. The result was I had to work in afactory to get to know the working class better.
So for five years, I worked in an electronics fac-tory as an engineer.
When the computer era came, the SlovakTechnical University bought one of the firstRussian computers, Ural II. They needed engi-neers, and I applied and was accepted. The Ural IIwas built from electronic lamps—not even tran-sistors. It used perforated film that we punchedholes in, and that’s how we read the program in.That machine had to have strong air condition-ing because of the heat that the lamps put out. Itwould break down almost every hour or so, soyou had to reboot it, clean it, and cool it.
I finished my PhD thesis and defended it in1967. Then, I got the opportunity to go toAmerica. My boss, Professor Gvozdiak, had metJohn McCarthy in Manchester the year before.McCarthy told him that he would entertainsomebody from Gvozdiak’s group if he wouldsend somebody to Stanford for studies. It turnedout that I was the first female PhD in Slovakiain electrical engineering. When this opportuni-ty came, I had to jump all kinds of obstacles,but eventually they let me go. I did my PhD atStanford in computer vision, specifically texturerecognition. My first PhD, in electrical engi-neering, had been on Markovian processes andlearning machines, so I had always been inter-ested in how you can use mathematics and thenew insights that you get from technology toexplain human behavior. It was rather natural,therefore, for me to think about computervision. Initially, I had every intention to go backafter a year, but when the Russians moved intoCzechoslovakia in 1968, I decided not to return.
Ann HardyAnn Hardy joined IBM in 1956 and worked on anumber of projects including the Stretch supercom-puter. In 1966, she joined Tymshare, where she wrotea time-sharing operating system and online applica-tions for the Tymnet network. She has headed soft-ware startups including KeyLogic and Agorics.
When I went to Pomona College, I wantedto be a chemistry major. I would have loved tohave been a doctor. Unfortunately, my advisorwas the chairman of the ChemistryDepartment, and he didn’t want girls in hislabs, so they wouldn’t let me major in chem-istry. I had to find a way around having a maleadvisor, so I majored in physical education, soI could have a woman for my advisor whowould let me take math and science.
When I graduated in 1955, I went to NewYork. I had a friend who was an engineer at IBM,and he said, “Why don’t you try applying for aprogramming job?” Well, just to give you some
80 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Anecdotes
idea of how ignorant I was, I’d never heard ofIBM. I’d never heard of computers. He gave me acrash course on who IBM was, what a computerwas, and what a programmer was. He said, “Gocall on them at World Headquarters,” which wasdown on Madison Avenue.
I went in and applied for the job, and I washaving this great interview with the personnelwoman until she asked me what my major was.She was so taken aback by the fact that I was aphysical education major that she didn’t knowquite how to handle it. I quickly jumped in andsaid, “But I’ve got several years of math andchemistry, and I think I could take your testanyway, even if I was a physical educationmajor.” At that point, IBM had aptitude tests tosee if you might be qualified. Fortunately, Ipassed the test, and they gave me the job.
The next thing IBM did after hiring us wasgive us six weeks of training on “What’s a com-puter?” (It turned out I wasn’t the only personwho didn’t know this when I started.) The IBMbuilding was on the corner; it had glass win-dows, and they had their computer in there sothat everybody could look at the computer.There was a class of 20 with about two or threewomen. The women always got to work on thecomputer in the window, because they wantedto make it look simple. They told us, “It’simportant for IBM sales that it looks easy to usea computer, so the women always work in thewindow if they have anything to do, becausethe men will think it’s easy if they see womenworking there.”
When we got to the end of the class, theytook the top three people and offered thempositions in sales because that’s where youcould get the most money and where youcould go up the corporate ladder. I was one ofthe top three, but they took me aside and said,“Women can’t be in sales, so you can be a sys-tem service girl, or you can go into program-ming.” They expected girls to go into it andleave in a year or two.
I decided to go into programming, whichlooked like it had more opportunity. I had agreat time. I worked for a while in New York,and then I went to IBM Research. From there, Iwent into the Stretch Project. I worked on theFortran compiler for Stretch, and then I didsome of the language development for Harvest.I liked programming. I was lucky that I fell intosomething I really enjoyed.
Adele GoldbergAdele Goldberg received her PhD in information sci-ence from the University of Chicago in 1973. She wasa research manager for 14 years at Xerox PARC, where
she codeveloped the object-oriented languageSmalltalk. She was ACM’s president from 1984 to 1986.
As an undergraduate at the University ofMichigan, I did math and some computing. Ilike problem solving, so I thought the pro-gramming was interesting. After my junioryear, I traveled around Europe, and everywhereI went there was this huge building with anIBM sign on it. I thought, “There’s this compa-ny that does computers. I liked my computerclass; it was fun, and you could live all over theworld if you worked for them.”
My dad’s company had just bought an IBM6600, so he knew the sales guy and systemsengineer out of the local Chicago IBM office. Idon’t know how he arranged it, but they agreedthat I would be a clerk for the summer and fallof 1966 in what IBM called an InstallationCenter. IBM had these centers where theywould sell unit record machines to small busi-nesses. Instead of doing the programming forthe customers, the customers would do theirown, going to class. If they needed help, they’dcome to these centers, and they could sit with asystems engineer. I was in the adjacent businessoffice, and there really wasn’t very much clerk-ing work to do. They had programmed instruc-tion manuals, so when I had spare time, I’d gothrough the programmed instruction andteach myself.
A unit record machine is basically anaccounting machine where you program aphysical board that has holes in it, just like atelephone switchboard. Sets of holes serve astemporary storage locations, or registers. Yourun physical wires from register to register totransfer the data or process the data. That was“programming.” These were, to me, a wonder-ful way to touch and feel and say, “Ah!Information bits are transferring from oneplace to another, and you’re manipulating it.”
I guess someone noticed that I had figuredthis stuff out, because at one point, probablythe highlight of my summer—mind you, it wasthe summer that I had cut my pigtails off inhopes of looking a little older—I was asked togo out and fix a machine on the West Side ofChicago.
The sales or systems engineer introduced meto this blue-collar manager and said that Iwould fix the board. You could just see the dis-belief in his face. I was just a kid, and in thosedays, people didn’t think about kids doingcomputing. I remember having a grand oldtime following all the wires and concludingthat it worked just fine, and therefore, it was ahardware problem. So the first thing I learned
October–December 2003 81
was that not everyone thought young womenshould be running around doing this, and thesecond thing was that you didn’t just call upthe field engineer or hardware person and tellthem it was their problem. They didn’t believeme, and it took a couple of weeks for them tocome check. But it was true; they had installeda 12-register instead of a 16-register machine.Phew, I was correct!
Anita BorgAnita Borg received her PhD in computer sciencefrom New York University in 1981. After designing acommercial operating system, she joined DigitalEquipment’s Western Research Laboratory in 1988.She started the Systers mailing list for women in com-puting and cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebrationof Women in Computing. In 1997, she founded theInstitute for Women and Technology. Anita Borgpassed away prematurely in April 2003, at age 54.
In 1969, I quit college after two years at theUniversity of Washington and moved with myhusband to New York, where he was startinggraduate school. I didn’t know what I wasgoing to do. What kind of job could I get with-out a degree? A friend of mine said, “Get intodata processing.” At the first job I got, theywere going to train me to do Fortran. I took theFortran class, and then over the long weekend,I went to Woodstock. I came back withmononucleosis, was sick for six weeks, and lostthe job. The next job was a “girl Friday” for thedata processing department of a small insur-ance company. While I was there, I got hold ofsome Cobol Program Instruction manuals, so Itaught myself basic Cobol and started doingsome programming.
After my divorce, I went to finish my under-graduate degree at NYU and decided to majorin computer science because I wasn’t ever goingto depend on anybody else to support meagain. At that time, I was living with a lawyer.Our plan was to hop in our van with our twobig motorcycles and move to Oregon. He wasgoing to be a hippie lawyer, I was going to be ahippie programmer, and we were going to havehippie babies and grow pot in the backyard.But I figured, what the heck, I’ll throw in oneapplication for graduate school. Once I wasinto it, I got hooked.
I worked on operating systems, and my the-sis was fairly theoretical, trying to figure outhow synchronization mechanisms worked. Ihad never really looked at a real operating sys-tem, so it was very theoretical in that sense.When I got out and got a job for a startup actu-ally building one, it was a whole different ball
game. Then I learned about the real world, andthat’s where the real fun started.
We were creating a fault-tolerant operatingsystem. The idea was to embed all the fault tol-erance in the operating system so you couldjust run ordinary programs, and if the hard-ware failed, you wouldn’t notice it. We didn’treally understand how hard what we were try-ing to do was.
Unfortunately, we didn’t understand muchabout startups, either. The company, Auragen,went down the tubes. Nixdorf had been one ofour investors and had the rights to the tech-nology, and they hired me to come to Germanyfor a year to finish up the fault tolerance partbecause that had been my baby. I got a paperout of it, which turned out to be the best thingthat ever happened to my career. The ACMSymposium on Operating System Principleswas coming up, and I submitted a paper. I’dnever given a paper before—I’d never evengiven a talk before—and I gave a stunningpaper to 300 of the top people in operating sys-tems. Suddenly, I was on the map.
AcknowledgmentThis research was funded in part by theNational Science Foundation and theSmithsonian Institution.
Janet AbbateChemical Heritage Foundation
A 1965 era spreadsheetIn 1979, a new computer tool, the spreadsheet,appeared onto the scene that became a vital ele-ment in introducing computers into homes,small businesses, and schools. This was not justanother row and column table used by account-ants to record transactions. In the software area,it was as far removed from the prior art as werecomputers by the mid-1960s were from theirmid-1950s-era predecessors. VisiCalc becamerecognized as the first commercially successfulelectronic spreadsheet program and set thestandard for the many versions that followed.
By about 1964, I began to look for a betterway to handle business forecasts. I developedand used a program that was about midwaybetween the old accounting tables and a mod-ern spreadsheet. It was not interactive but didprovide many of the functional capabilities ofa spreadsheet, yet it only ran in a batch mode.Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, developers ofVisiCalc, had no knowledge of my program in1978 when they did their work.
82 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Anecdotes