[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus sed:
I wonder what life was like as a working programmer at IBM in those 
days.   I assume it was depressingly regimented and the real hackers who 
could take something like this on were at the ivy league schools?


I've a friend in his late 70s who was a bit in that froth... he 
graduated MIT around 1963 with a degree in Architecture but a hankering 
and aptitude for programming (nearly failed his Architecture degree 
because of all the time he spent in the computer lab)...   He was 
solicited by IBM to come to NMTech as the human "analyst" attached to 
the IBM they had sold to Stirling Colgate who was leading that charge in 
those days.   Before he could actually begin his work, but had already 
relocated, DEC got to Stirling and they dropped IBM for a DEC machine, 
like the gentlemen duelists IBM and DEC were at the time, my friend was 
"gifted" to DEC by IBM... "ah the pleasures of being chattel, or at 
least an indentured servant!".   He stayed with DEC until retirement, 
taking a few years sabbatical to work at a startup which sold out big 
enough to give him room to then singlehandedly build a PASCAL compiler 
and P-Code interpreter for the pre-DOS IBM PC and even declined an offer 
from Bill Gates himself for packaging it with DOS, that included 
royalties... he felt it wasn't finished and besides, he didn't think 
much of Gates and didn't think he was really going anywhere.


One of his more influential professors was Minsky himself... he found 
him a bit "droll" as I remember.


On 6/5/17 10:31 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> I wonder what life was like as a working programmer at IBM in those 
> days.   I assume it was depressingly regimented and the real hackers 
> who could take something like this on were at the ivy league schools?
>
> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Barry 
> MacKichan
> *Sent:* Monday, June 05, 2017 9:45 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman
>
> 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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