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...
The story of our Red language and the whole DoD-I competition.
http://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/index.htm
I invited Grace to talk to my local area languages group and picked her up at the airport. Her talk is engraven in memory. At the end, the sight of her in uniform - small, straightbacked, saluting - still gets to me. As I drove her back, she explained who was funding her travel and recited the thank you letter I was to write to them. LOVED that woman!
The talk she gave was on the archeology of computer systems. How what she learned for small memories suddenly became relevant again as small computers emerged, and how people should remember the software hacks they used as well as the hardware.
I have a whole YouTube playlist of Computer History. One set of interviews is for an eccentric genius, John Cocke. I put up all the raw footage of the interviews. The others are videos done as significant research was happening in the multimedia field. And there’s a video where I’m crawling around the floor with a camera up into people’s faces during an actual group meeting of John Backus’ group on reduction languages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NQuHpUyZbI&list=PLYTtL1FB2XCphoR3BCIszdSlRFSQAOMPs
But my favorite video is an emotional You Were There memory of what it was like to be part of an all day computer meeting. This was when I was being sec to X3J13. Those are all the major names in the field. MUCH YOUNGER!