Comment by danielvaughn
2 years ago
Several years back, I took a trip to a casino up in Connecticut. I'm not big into gambling, but my brother-in-law's mother was a high roller. She got an extra room for free, so we figured why not take advantage of it.
We didn't spend much time with her while we were there, but on the last night she wanted to join us with some of her friends for dinner. Since I was going to be having dinner with a group of old retired ladies, I figured we could just make some polite small talk with them and be on our way after the meal.
After we ordered drinks, one of them turns to me and says "now what do you do for work?" I said "oh I work with computers", a simple generic phrase I use when talking with older people. She says "oh that's interesting, what specifically?" When I told her I was a software engineer, her face lights up and she points around the room and says "oh that's wonderful - we all did that as well, we worked at a company called Bell Labs. Have you heard of it?"
I just about fell out of my chair. For the rest of the night I was asking them all sorts of questions about their work. They were around back when you'd program using punch cards and all that stuff. It was a very cool experience - one of my favorite memories.
Man, what an experience! I got goosebumps just reading that. So much history you could have learned. It's a shame you only got one evening with them. I mean you were with the pioneers of our field. It's like if you just happened to go out to dinner with a bunch of old men and they casually reveal, yes we played baseball too back in NY in 1932, hi, my name is George...
Yeah it was quite an experience. They were very old - in their late 70's. I got the sense that they retired somewhere between 1980-1990, which kinda tracks with the sudden gender imbalance in the field. Prior to the 80's, computing had a larger percentage of women in the industry.
I also got the sense that even though they knew Bells Labs was important, they weren't quite aware of just how fundamental it was to...well basically everything we do today.
Tangentially related, I got stuck in an airport bar for a few hours (due to snow) next to an older woman who worked at Wang and later, Cray.
Great story, thanks for sharing!