@evdelen @lizardbill
Bill Gates called IBM's method of paying programmers by the line of code, "The race to build the world's heaviest airplane."
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@pluralistic @evdelen @lizardbill
"the world's heaviest airplane" - sadly Microsoft still thinks reinventing the wheel is better than fixing bugs. Witness the Windows 11 abomination.
"the world's heaviest airplane" - sadly Microsoft still thinks reinventing the wheel is better than fixing bugs. Witness the Windows 11 abomination.
@pluralistic @afx @evdelen @lizardbill
Other anecdotes:
1) IBM managers realized that programmers were just sitting there typing on keyboards, and getting paid a lot more than typists, for ( what they thought ) was a similar, slightly more technical job. So IBM starts firing programmers and replacing them with typists, with some training thrown in.
2) Airconditioning failed at an IBM office and programmers had to seek management approval to take off the ties ( they all wore business suits ).
@purrperl @pluralistic @afx @evdelen @lizardbill
Huge culture change at #IBM was when they started wearing Polo shorts...
... Everyone was wearing Polo shirts so it became the new uniform
🙄
@purrperl @pluralistic @afx @evdelen @lizardbill My mother was one of those punch card programmers. She moved to Florida, tried to get a job, and was told, "We don't hire women as programmers." So, she took one of those keypunch operator jobs, instead.
@clayfoot
Roughly speaking, programmers were all women, from the eniac days (40s) because "everyone knew" the machines the men made did the calculations, they just needed some clerical types to make the arrangements and women were good with tedious work (sic) and couldn't be mathematicians like the men.
Surprise, the women were good at it; the eniac learned how to (plug) program the machines by reading the schematics.
Same logic applied to 1st gen stored program machines, but eventually (early to mid 50s) the men noticed (sic) programming was actually an/the critical skill.
By the late 1950s programming was a male occupation.
Back in england, there was an explicit, stated, plan to get women out of programming. Here in the US it was done the usual American way (shit pay and preferential hiring). We ended up with Mel Kaye and overtly macho programming that still exists today.
There's some but not a lot written about this era and process. It was quite explicit.
@tomjennings @clayfoot @purrperl @pluralistic @afx @evdelen @lizardbill Mel Kaye wasn’t one of the “macho” programmers; his story was written to make fun of the “real programmers” fad.
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