[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

Steven A Smith sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Jun 5 12:58:16 EDT 2017


Today young people needn't leave their books and classrooms for the 
computer lab, they can simply shift from playing video games and 
chatting on social media and watching "stupid trick" youtube videos to 
programming/hacking on their own computer/internet. Well many of them 
anyway.


Most probably don't even know what a computer lab is anymore, that was 
our generation(s)'s thing!


On 6/5/17 10:53 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Steve writes:
>
> “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)...”
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html
>
> “In the early 1950s, the computer industry was in its infancy, with no 
> settled culture or rigid career paths. Lois Haibt, a contemporary of 
> Ms. Sammet’s at IBM, where Ms. Sammet worked for nearly three decades, 
> observed, “They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for 
> problem-solving skills — bridge players, chess players, even women.”
>
> Among these aptitudes I would certainly select for the individuals 
> that had the right priorities and didn’t leave the computer lab for 
> mere lectures and classwork!  How else can one develop the proper 
> skills?    (Oh, I suppose there are impressionable young people on 
> this list who I should not contaminate with these subversive ideas.)
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170605/afe688f6/attachment.html>


More information about the Friam mailing list