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Date: Published in the now defunct Computer Design
magazine, January 1997, page 40.
"He kept mumbling about how they looked at my
grades and my record and thought I was a man. This was hard to believe,
since I'd been campus homecoming queen."
O nce upon a time, long ago
and far away.....
Well, it wasn't all that long ago (35 years) and
not so far away (3,000 miles). I entered college wanting to be a nuclear
scientist and settled for becoming an electrical-engineering major. I
wanted to be a nuclear scientist because I got to touch and see a nuclear
reactor site back in high school. Little did I realize that it was the
control room that had mesmerized me. All those circuits, dials and levers.
And it would be the analog stuff that would come around to haunt me.
I majored in generators and tubes. All those motors.
All those wires. All that spilled oil. And as the only girl in class,
I was handed a clipboard. Of course, only men played with motor windings.
There was an elective class in something called transistor theory. It
looked promising. [1962] I took it. I liked tracing the little holes and
electrons all around the circuit. Besides, I'd mastered the clipboard.
There was another class: FORTRAN II. I found it trivial.
I also found it fun. And then there were all those lectures about patchboards,
trim pots, messy wires and all that stuff. And those labs, where I got
handed the clipboard. I avoided analog classes. Analog Design wound up
on my hit list.
I graduated and went to work for the phone company
and was handed another clipboard. This was getting boring. I changed over
to the space program. Little did I now they needed a woman, any woman,
to make their engineer recruitment numbers come out right. The man who
interviewed me was stunned when I arrived --- he kept mumbling about how
they looked at my grades and my record and thought I was a man. This was
hard to believe, since I'd been campus homecoming queen.
So they took me to a lab. And handed me a clipboard.
They also dragged me into the hallways and proudly showed me their analog
computer. More messy wires, patch cords, and trim pots. All those dials.
Then they showed me their digital computer. Hmmmmmmm. Let me think.
I got lucky. Computer simulation was now the buzzword.
The government required it. The only problem: Real men don't type. [Still
in the 60s.] So I traded my clipboard for a computer terminal and went
back to school. Time passed.
I was a logic designer, a system engineer, a program
manager. I moved from circuits to systems to bit-slice to ASICs. I learned
high-level programming. Databases and test vectors. Trivial. Fun. I stayed
out of labs. (I'd learned.) I taught older engineers how to hold a floppy
(real men need to know this). And how to type (real men, these days, need
to know this). [This was the 80s.] How to point and click in UNIX, and
Windows, how to simulate. I even taught the boys at Nasa how to build
some of their bit-slice toys.
And then it happened. I was too old. I got thrown
away. So I got a new job. I was working with analog again. But wait, I
can handle this! No more patch boards to plug and trim pots to turn. It's
all programmable! We do it all on a desktop computer now. We point and
click in a Windows environment. We barely have to type anything.
Just don't hand me a clipboard.
PDF Scan of the Article
(Editor's Note: Dr. White is technical publications
manager and Webmaster for IMP in San Jose, CA (http://www.impweb.com))
[This was 1995-1996 and the two-year analog trial
project was called EPAC - electrically programmable analog circuit.]
Miss University of Hartford, 1960
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