[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

[Barry MacKichan]

This triggers some personal memories. I have a letter from her, 
basically a rejection letter, saying I couldn’t have a summer job with 
them (Boston Advanced Programming group) until I finished my second year 
in college. Although I don’t remember ever hearing the name of the 
project, one of the IBMers described it to me as “like Fortran, but 
symbolic rather than purely numeric.” Clearly it was FORMAC.

I always assumed Jean Sammet was a (French) man, but now, 55 years 
later, I see “(Miss)” written before her signature.

By the next summer, I had pretty much dropped my interest in computers 
and spent the summer paddling a canoe to Hudson Bay and it took me about 
20 years to get back into software.

--Barry


On 4 Jun 2017, at 11:01, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> She had the right idea about FORMAC.   Only a reality now with systems 
> like SymPy 50 years later.   But an evolved FORMAC would have been 
> better, as it would have been a high performance numerics language 
> too.
>
>
> http://www.pl-enthusiast.net/2017/05/24/jean-sammet-a-remembrance/


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