Exploring
I was fifteen years old in Dayton Ohio late in the fall of 1971 when I received in the mail an invitation to join a new Explorer Post sponsored by the local IBM office. Explorers were part of the Boy Scouts, but unlike that parent organization at the time, Explorers were co-ed, and focused less on outdoor skills and more on career skills.
My dad went with me one evening to the first orientation meeting, held at the IBM building in downtown Dayton. The two responsible adults were both IBM "systems analysts", a Black man named Charlie, and a White woman named Julie. They seemed ancient to a kid like me, but in hindsight Charlie was probably in his thirties, Julie in her twenties.
They delivered a pretty compelling pitch to a young nerd like me: learn to program computers in RPG II. The local office had an IBM System/3, a computer, remarkably small at the time, that would probably fit in a walk-in closet. It was equipped with a line printer, a 96-column (!) punch card reader, two 2.5 megabyte (!!) disk drives whose single-platters were each about the size of a pizza box, and an operator console in the form of a modified Selectric typewriter.
I spent the next couple of years attending meetings every other Saturday morning, with either Charlie or Julie riding herd on us kids, happily writing code, using a key punch, and running the cards through the card reader. I have no memory of the programs I wrote.
This was my introduction to information technology. Charlie and Julie were my role models. The fifteen year old me thought to himself: this must be what working in the computer field is like. You get to work with smart people who are Black, or female, and maybe even sometimes both. That seemed logical, since there were Black kids, and for sure a lot of girls, at my high school.
I've been lucky that my career path lead me to places that have a widely diverse workforce. It's always a bit of a surprise when I visit some place and find a sea of White male brogrammers. I was shocked at the ACM study that showed a precipitous drop in woman in the information technology field, an unfortunate trend which seems to have occurred mostly after my undergraduate years, affecting the age cohorts that followed mine. Study after study shows that diversity leads to better, more nuanced, decision making.
It's also a lot more fun.
Collaborate ? Deliver ? Iterate. ??
4 年Pretty impressive, particularly if you hadn’t had any education in the Calculus.
Senior Technical Recruiter (Freelance)
4 å¹´Holler for Hollerith cards!
Cyber, Software and System Engineer in IIoT and OT - with a keen liking for processes, and great at embedded software development. Computational Thinker.
4 å¹´We started out with an 8080 on a board with a hex keypad, a 4 digit hex display, and a monitor program that allowed us to key in values in memory before restarting the processor... 1980 ish... None of that modern punched cards stuff :-D
a.k.a. Chip Overclock?
4 å¹´That Explorer Post at IBM dissolved after a few years. I joined another one sponsored by the main computer center at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where I did some coding in FORTRAN for a CDC 6600. By that time, I had already learned BASIC and FORTRAN, so it wasn't quite the pivotal event that the IBM experience was.
a.k.a. Chip Overclock?
4 å¹´It wasn't until my junior year of high school that I got to take a computer science course there, writing BASIC using a ASR 33 teletype terminal connected to a timesharing system that used an HP minicomputer hidden somewhere in the dark recesses of the city school system. For a final project we each got different assignments, and mine was to compute the length of the spiral groove in a LP album. I did some research and found the equation for an Archimedes spiral (which an album is an example of), so I coded that up. But that seemed too easy. So I invented this iterative solution that estimated a segment of the spiral with a small angle of a circle, and I demonstrated that the smaller the angle was the closer the iterative result was to the closed form solution. I had *zero* idea at the time that I was basically re-inventing an entire class of algorithms for this kind of thing. I just wanted an excuse to dink around with the computer.