About Me

Nerd/Geek Alert

I wasn’t very good in school; it bored me to death, all that rote memorization… science was what I excelled at. I squeaked by and graduated from high school and went to UConn to study Electrical Engineering.

Well I flunked out of UConn, my one “A” class was an engineering class, all the other classes I got C’s and D’s. But in that one class we had to write a program in FORTRAN IV. In that I wrote my first program in FROTRAN and it was to solve 3 unknowns using Cramer's was in '69, I still have my FORTRAN coding sheets and my FORTRAN text book.

And that brings me to the article that I want to talk about…

The Secret History of Women in Coding
Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?
The New York Times Magazine
By Clive Thompson
February 13, 2019

As a teenager in Maryland in the 1950s, Mary Allen Wilkes had no plans to become a software pioneer — she dreamed of being a litigator. One day in junior high in 1950, though, her geography teacher surprised her with a comment: “Mary Allen, when you grow up, you should be a computer programmer!” Wilkes had no idea what a programmer was; she wasn’t even sure what a computer was. Relatively few Americans were. The first digital computers had been built barely a decade earlier at universities and in government labs.

By the time she was graduating from Wellesley College in 1959, she knew her legal ambitions were out of reach. Her mentors all told her the same thing: Don’t even bother applying to law school. “They said: ‘Don’t do it. You may not get in. Or if you get in, you may not get out. And if you get out, you won’t get a job,’ ” she recalls. If she lucked out and got hired, it wouldn’t be to argue cases in front of a judge. More likely, she would be a law librarian, a legal secretary, someone processing trusts and estates.

But Wilkes remembered her junior high school teacher’s suggestion. In college, she heard that computers were supposed to be the key to the future. She knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a few of them. So on the day of her graduation, she had her parents drive her over to M.I.T. and marched into the school’s employment office. “Do you have any jobs for computer programmers?” she asked. They did, and they hired her.

So many of the first programmers were women and one of the most famous computer engineers was Admiral Grace Hopper.

The Eniac women were among the first coders to discover that software never works right the first time — and that a programmer’s main work, really, is to find and fix the bugs. Their innovations included some of software’s core concepts. Betty Snyder realized that if you wanted to debug a program that wasn’t running correctly, it would help to have a “break point,” a moment when you could stop a program midway through its run. To this day, break points are a key part of the debugging process.

“— and that a programmer’s main work, really, is to find and fix the bugs” but they were not called “bugs” then and that is where Admiral Hopper comes in…

According to the Jargon Files,

Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated bug in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286.

The text of the log entry (from September 9, 1947), reads “1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found”. This wording establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense — and Hopper herself reports that the term bug was regularly applied to problems in radar electronics during WWII.

So back to me story.

After flunking out of UConn I went to Waterbury State Technical College and got my ASEET (translation: Associate of Science Electrical Engineering Technology) and there I learned BASIC.

I then when to Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and that elusive BSEE slipped from my grasp again due to liberal arts classes and too much partying. But I switched to the School of Technology that didn’t require as much math and theory. There I built my first computer using an Intel 4004!

Out of college and at my third job one of the draftsman got an AIM65 a development single board computer which I wrote programs for in Assembly Language and using an on-board compiler. I used it as my alarm clock. I wrote a program in BASIC that used a temperature sensitive resister to measure outside temperature and a relay to turn on a radio. I brought it into work one day and my boss picked it up after walking across the room on a cold dry winter’s day… ZAP and that was the end of that.

At work one day back in the early eighties the owner asked me to write a program for a “Black” Apple II+ and a Magnavox LASER Disk Player, he wanted a program to retrieve drawings and photos. It was a simple program that allowed you to enter a part number and retrieve the drawing, a photo of the part and photo of the location it is used in a power plant. It also allowed to walk through the power plant like Google now does with “Street View.” I did a number of other BASIC programs mainly to interface with test equipment. I still have the “Black” Apple II+, the Magnavox 12 inch LASER Disk Player and the demo disk.

Later on I learned HTML IV and finally before they shut the plant I learned to program PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) When I was laid off from work when they closed the factory we were using PLCs in parallel processing, we had 4 electronic bays running in parallel and you could shut down one bay and still have redundant 2 out of 3 logic. In other words if two if the electronic bays detected a problem it would shut down the plant. I still have my textbooks from the class.

Then I retired and put all my electronic stuff down in the basement.

So back to the article.

The field rewarded aptitude: Applicants were often given a test (typically one involving pattern recognition), hired if they passed it and trained on the job, a process that made the field especially receptive to neophytes. “Know Nothing About Computers? Then We’ll Teach You (and Pay You While Doing So),” one British ad promised in 1965. In a 1957 recruiting pitch in the United States, IBM’s brochure titled “My Fair Ladies” specifically encouraged women to apply for coding jobs.
[…]
If we want to pinpoint a moment when women began to be forced out of programming, we can look at one year: 1984. A decade earlier, a study revealed that the numbers of men and women who expressed an interest in coding as a career were equal. Men were more likely to enroll in computer-science programs, but women’s participation rose steadily and rapidly through the late ’70s until, by the 1983-84 academic year, 37.1 percent of all students graduating with degrees in computer and information sciences were women. In only one decade, their participation rate more than doubled.

But then things went into reverse. From 1984 onward, the percentage dropped; by the time 2010 rolled around, it had been cut in half. Only 17.6 percent of the students graduating from computer-science and information-science programs were women.
[…]
One researcher was Allan Fisher, then the associate dean of the computer-science school at Carnegie Mellon University. The school established an undergraduate program in computer science in 1988, and after a few years of operation, Fisher noticed that the proportion of women in the major was consistently below 10 percent. In 1994, he hired Jane Margolis, a social scientist who is now a senior researcher in the U.C.L.A. School of Education and Information Studies, to figure out why. Over four years, from 1995 to 1999, she and her colleagues interviewed and tracked roughly 100 undergraduates, male and female, in Carnegie Mellon’s computer-science department; she and Fisher later published the findings in their 2002 book “Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing.”

What Margolis discovered was that the first-year students arriving at Carnegie Mellon with substantial experience were almost all male. They had received much more exposure to computers than girls had; for example, boys were more than twice as likely to have been given one as a gift by their parents. And if parents bought a computer for the family, they most often put it in a son’s room, not a daughter’s. Sons also tended to have what amounted to an “internship” relationship with fathers, working through Basic-language manuals with them, receiving encouragement from them; the same wasn’t true for daughters. “That was a very important part of our findings,” Margolis says. Nearly every female student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon told Margolis that her father had worked with her brother — “and they had to fight their way through to get some attention.”

So this brings me back to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) classes there has been a push to get women in to the STEM fields and I second that effort.

There is good money to be made in STEM; most of the current Silicon Valley billionaires are in the STEM fields and even if you don’t start up your own company there is good money in STEM.

When I was graduating with my MSW in 2011 my classmates were boasting about getting $40,000 to $50,000 jobs, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that a Nuclear Engineer fresh out of college was getting a starting pay in 2007 of  $60,000.

My education allowed me to retire comfortably at age 59. My advice to students graduating from high school is, it’s great to graduate from college with a liberal arts degree but they are a dime a dozen go for a STEM degree especially if you are women.