Stalked by Analog Design

"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."

      Once 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 know 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.
 

(Editor's Note: Dr. White is [was] 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. The plug was pulled from the project in early 1997.]

I was the first Miss University of Hartford in Connecticut for the new campus, 1960. I was also the only woman electrical engineering student on campus, and on full scholarship, which required I stay on the Dean's List. I got to be dragged out for fundraising the whole four years. I graduated with an ASE in 1962 and a BSEE in 1964. And fled to California. Oh yes, I was a member of the Honorary Engineering Fraternity Kappa Mu all four years. I am a fraternity brother.