I LOVED THAT! What memories.
I was never as good with the machines as my husband was. I moved into computer language design, so my main tool was a xerox machine. I made more mistakes in two-upping my early magazines than you will ever imagine. I was in the contest to design the DoD-I language that became Ada - with the red team. We came in 2nd and Jean won the French Legion of Honor for designing the American defense language. Sigh. Then I chaired the SIG group for Programming Languages and ran a number of conferences. Started the Ada group and an Ada magazine and a Lisp magazine. Was Secretary of the X3J13 Lisp Standards Group for a while.
But languages got tiring, and I talked the IBM Research Director into letting me do something more fun and got an international multimedia magazine. That WAS more fun! Husband and I retired and he runs our computer world. Neither of us do any “real” work but we both work with a ollege professor (my 2nd, his 1st) on statistical analysis of poetry data.
Now all of that won’t turn you on, so I’ll pass your post on to husband who will be turned on by your hardware memories, and he’ll get back to you with joy.
When I moved to Atlanta in 1975 I worked for a small company headed by hardware engineers. It was software chaos with those guys, so we persuaded them to hire an independent contractor to install some software management. They hired Sharlene Lampkin, who turned out to be one of Admiral Grace Hopper's girls from the FORTRAN development group. They could not have made a better move. Sharlene put us on track, but made our sides ache with laughter. She was very bright and always looking for something funny.
Sharlene was a bit homely, easily overlooked. She told us that Grace's team was always jealous of her because she was the best looking one of the entire bunch. I enjoyed every millisecond with her.
Always wanted to learn Ada. I never had an opportunity.
You had a wonderful career. How do we tell the young ones about the god-like presence of being in the same room with big iron? Kids seem to think I am smoking dope when I tell them that a compiler is just another program...