[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

[Pamela McCorduck]

Striking for me to go to labs now (for those still exist) and hear the quiet. Computer labs in the beginning were rackety. Almost unbearably so. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 5, 2017, at 9:58 AM, Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>  
>> 
>> 
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> 
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