My soul is made of ones and zeroes

The personal story of a female computer programmer

This newsletter is in honor of both my mother and my daughter, whose 21st birthday is today. I am lucky to be sandwiched between these two creative, thoughtful women who make our world a better place one stitch at a time.

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A little while back I wrote a newsletter about how I couldn’t understand the business world, and how it didn’t connect to anything real in my experience. I invoked my 78-year-old mom, who promptly sent me an essay she wrote a decade ago about how, exactly, she had spent her career years. I knew she started out as a computer programmer, but this description did not translate for me into something I could understand. When I read the essay, my ideas changed.

Did you know that the computer science field used to be populated mostly by women? I did not! This is because in the early days, there was a lot of tedious computation and other number-work involved, and women seemed the better fit for this secretarial-adjacent task.¹ Read this fascinating story in the NYT Magazine² from 2019. If you read it, you’ll learn about Admiral Grace Hopper and the Cobol computer language, which is the one my mom used most frequently in her work. It was just one of seven she was fluent in.

Women could do the work from home, they could do it part-time, they could do it in an office, providing they weren’t pregnant or whatever.³ The NYTMag article states that in 1967, women coders could become white-collar workers via coding:

Women could make $20,000 a year doing this work (or more than $150,000 in today’s money). It was the rare white-collar occupation in which women could thrive. Nearly every other highly trained professional field admitted few women; even women with math degrees had limited options: teaching high school math or doing rote calculations at insurance firms.

By 1984, men began to overtake women in the coding and programming fields. This shift has to do with how personal computers began to invade people’s homes, and how most of the people doing anything with those were men and their sons. You can read more in that NYT article, but it’s nothing surprising. Today, there are girls’ robotics clubs in schools and incentives for university women studying STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and business goals for hiring women in these industries to combat the deep sense that this kind of work is for males only.

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But back to my mom.

In this youtube video produced by IBM, you can see the IBM 1401. Mom tells me this was the first computer she programmed. Here’s a page from the version available online so you too can be baffled:

Just lookit this nonsense!

Here are two really interesting parts of my mom’s story which I dragged out of her after she sent me the essay: at her first job, she made $3800 a year…but the men they hired to do the same work made $6500 a year. And she had to train them.⁴

Second, at a credit card company that shall not be named, pre-internet 1990s, she helped them enact some programming that allowed the company to watch card users’ purchases, create profiles of likely users, and target advertising toward them. It was highly effective. Then she tells me what they called it back then: data mining. It was fucking data mining, y’all. I’m not proud, but I’m kinda proud.

Both my parents were programmers. After their divorce and my father’s death, I lived exclusively with my programmer-mother. We had multiple personal computers at home, not common in the early ‘80s! Sadly, at the time I did not take much advantage of this proximity to such technology, because it didn’t feel real to me. But as it turns out…I’ve made a left turn, completely accidentally, into a most amateur bit of coding which I must do in HTML to make the language activities function the way I want in the courses I build. Genetics. They’ll get you every time.

Here is my mother’s essay, in her own elegant words.

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Ones and Zeroes by Ellie Malloch 

When I was in the ninth grade, in 1958, my mother’s workplace began training its own computer  programmers. Everyone was given an aptitude test, and anyone who passed was enrolled in a programming course. Mother, scoring well, soon began bringing her IBM programming manuals home.  

One evening, while she struggled to get through mountains of homework, I picked up the first book in the series and started reading. For some reason, the material struck a resonant chord somewhere deep within me.  

During the next few years, I finished high school, attended two years of college, and finally trundled off to New York City for a memorable if poverty-stricken twelve months. I worked as a lowly file clerk for a large corporation. To make ends meet, I lived in a boarding house and ate peanut butter sandwiches for  lunch. When my shoes wore thin, I returned home to Virginia to live with my family. I took the first job I  could find, key punching computer cards at a civil service facility. Very quickly, I found the work mind numbingly boring. 

Twelve weeks later, I was hired as programmer trainee by a business expanding its staff. I began my job in December of 1964, when I was twenty years old.

College courses were held at night where I worked, and anyone who attended a class was excused from work without penalty. One day a flyer came around listing the latest schedule of classes. When I noticed a computer programming course, I flashed back to that IBM manual I’d browsed so many years before. I signed up for the course within the hour. 

By the second week of class I was hooked. Programming seemed tailor-made for my brain. Twelve weeks later, with an “A” on my course, I was hired as programmer trainee by a business that was expanding its staff. I began my job in December of 1964, when I was twenty years old. For a year’s work, I would be paid $3,820, the same paltry salary I had been making as a key punch operator, but worth it for the  immense difference in the work. 

My new job was thirty miles from my home. Having no car, I took the Trailways bus, which meant a quarter-mile walk to the bus stop before six o’clock every morning, and the reverse at day’s end. In the winter my walks were cold, dark and frightening. I walked down the middle of the street because the shadowy sidewalks, with their overhanging trees, looked like good hiding places for lurking baddies. On summer evenings, the heat was so blistering I had to step carefully to avoid spots of melted tar on the pavement.

Regardless of the inconvenient commute, I fell in love with the work, and found it so compelling I wanted to share it with everyone. Usually introspective and quiet, I bored all who would listen, including my dates, with endless descriptions of code. Every program I was asked to write was a new challenge, a new creation, a new experience. 

An unanticipated benefit of my job was my introduction to people who were smart, funny and interesting, and who all cared hugely about doing their best. As a child, I was a straight-A, bookish girl with curly blond hair, thick glasses and few friends. I found my people when I landed amongst a group of programmers. My colleagues were more like me than not, and that never changed. The people who worked with me were my sweet treasures. I prized them, every one, even those I didn’t actually like much. 

We programmers were all geeky nerds, but we didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have cared if we had. The ones and zeroes we manipulated were hidden away inside the computer, where we couldn’t see, hear, smell or touch them, but we believed without question that the computer would do what we told it. And it did. With time, we became master craftsmen. We thought in terms of computer instructions, we pared our code to use the fewest machine cycles possible; we added and subtracted in hexadecimal. And we could debug anything. 

To conquer learning a new language, a new computer and a new operating system, sometimes all at once, and then to channel that jumble into working programs, was a mind-boggling task. When deadlines were upon us, we routinely worked hundred-hour weeks, with two-hour sleep breaks taken on the floor. But when our new systems began cranking successfully, we became the jubilant gods and goddesses of computing, essential to our company’s success. 

Working those long hours that paid time-and-a-half often provided large paychecks. Once, after such a period, I was paid $300 for one week. When I took my check to the bank clerk for cashing, she looked at it, and asked me, “Is this your check?” Nobody could understand what we did.  

I went to work at my second job, at a large department store, in 1966. We had an IBM 1401 computer, with only 4K of memory. Just imagine that. We were writing code in a language called Autocoder, which was the assembly language for the 1401.⁵ The memory was so limited that we had to learn to code in overlays. That meant that we had to do a certain operation, say maybe a summation of data that had been entered by punched cards. Once that was done, we had to use those sums to do further arithmetic, for instance, create payroll, which called for another set of instructions. We overlaid the second instruction set over top (in memory) of the original set that did the summations. It was tough. You had to know exactly where in memory, for instance, location 3000 (out of 4096 possible locations) to load the second set of instructions.

Another really big effort we made was preparing to receive our IBM System 360. This meant learning a brand new assembly language, which we called Assembler, brand new data management systems, and a brand new job control language, which was required to get the program running. The manual was called Principles of Operation, which we called POO.⁶ All seven of us (six women and one man⁷) worked insane hours routinely. There was a 24-hour White Tower two blocks away and we got in the habit of traipsing down the street at 3 am for coffee and donuts. The bottom line was that we were ready in time. I paid for my first car with the money I made then.

My mom and her Spitfire, 1966

Because we could fix things that might go wrong, we techies were often asked to tag along when our company introduced new technology to its people. Most of these trips were hum-drum, but occasionally they held a happy surprise.  

I was working for a newspaper in the late 1970s when the first hand-held devices came on the market. We had reporters stationed in Washington, D.C., two hours north, who covered the national news. They wanted the hand-helds for interviewing in the field , so we ordered one, programmed it, and drove to Washington early one morning to show it off. Our people were completely taken with the little device, and refused to let us return home with it. When we had wrapped up our business and were ready to leave, a senior reporter asked, “How about lunch at the Press Club?” Wow! I was utterly thrilled to take a chair at a linen-covered table and have a meal in the company of media greats.  

In the late 1980s, I worked for a business that provided computer technicians, and most of our customers were government agencies. One morning, as I stood in my office, my phone rang. A male voice said, “This is so-and-so. I’m calling from the White House.” Terrified that one of our newly-installed systems had malfunctioned, I sat down, heart pounding. “How can I help you?” I asked. “I’m calling to say thanks for the great new software,” he said. “We use it every day, over and over.” Relieved and proud, I stood back up, grinning like a fool.

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I stayed in the information technology field for thirty-eight years. No matter how difficult the work, I was never tempted to stray. I belonged in that world, and whatever spell was cast when I read my mother’s IBM manual at fourteen was still with me to my last working day. Over time, I learned seven programming languages and worked with six mainframe computers, each carrying its own set of idiosyncrasies. Because technical skills are portable from one industry to another, I skipped around a lot. I learned about electric power billing, retail sales, medical insurance, electronic typesetting, newspaper publishing, materiel management and credit card processing.  

To celebrate turning seventy, I challenged myself by learning Apple’s Swift programming language, and was rewarded by seeing my creation on the iPhone screen. Sometimes I daydream about jumping into the programming soup again. My soul is made of ones and zeroes. 

My mom being adorable AF in spring 2023

1. Since we often excel at tedious shit, amirite?

2. Can’t view NYT? Email me and I’ll send it to you as a PDF.

3. Learn more, in this article from The Guardian

4. The Equal Pay Act went into effect in 1963, so….I don’t know how they got away with that. But for the two years she worked there, no other women were hired as programmers beyond the two they already had. Maybe they didn’t want to invite scrutiny, so, men it was!

5. The screenshot of the manual I included above belongs to this machine.

6. Of course they did!

7. That man ended up becoming my father.