Thank you again for joining us here this afternoon.
I thought we could begin at the beginning as we discussed and talk a little bit about
when and where you were born.
I was born in Paley, Indiana, and I'm not telling what year it was.
But it was 1936 in August.
And could you describe where you spend your youth and what sort of community it was?
Okay, I left Paoli when I was six weeks old.
So I don't remember too much about that part of it,
but I do know that my family moved from Paoli, Indiana,
to other parts of Indiana, for example, Bloomingdale.
We also moved to parts of Michigan, Ohio,
Midwest, basically, was where I spent a great part of my life.
And I don't know how far you mean when I was young,
but I guess in high school is where I ended up in Michigan,
in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Oh.
again. So I was used to being in classrooms with people I didn't know going to new places
and living in different places.
Was that moving around through high school age?
Was that because of the activities of your parents, I assume?
Well, when I was born, it was before the World War II.
So some of it had to do with the war.
And some of it had to do with the war.
of having different teaching in different places,
but both parents were involved in teaching.
So it was or of living with grandparents part of the time.
And could we talk a little bit about your parents?
You mentioned they were teachers.
Yes.
Just about them and about their kind of most notable characteristics.
Yes.
Well, my mother was a teacher in high school, and so she taught most of the time that I remember.
It's hard to remember that many years ago, but I think most of the time she was teaching.
My father was a professor in college, and he taught English, philosophy, poetry.
And he was in the war during World War II, so he took a break.
a break from teaching.
And he was also president of the Michigan Poetry Society.
So he's quite active in the poetry end of things, his favorite pastime.
And had they both been in Indiana for a long time by the time you were born, or was that...
Actually, they had met each other in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
in a different place than where I went to high school,
near Escanaba, Michigan.
And it was a little town called Garden.
It would be lucky if I could say it had 100 people.
It was tiny.
Which is like in Michigan, I lived in a town of 200 people.
So it was a lot of little towns that I found myself in
for one reason or another.
And so would you describe the context?
describe the context in which you grew up as primarily rural?
Well, I've lived in places where there's woods
that might fall under that, but they were usually,
as I remember, little towns with the main street that was tiny.
So you knew all your neighbors.
So it was a town as opposed to being out in the country normally.
Well, um,
Well, if you had to describe it, what would have been sort of the primary,
primary interests of your parents' household?
Was it the arts and poetry, learning?
Okay. Well, first of all, I have two separate families.
One is my father's side.
One is my mother's side.
I guess everybody, you know,
Everybody, you know, was into reading and the arts.
In fact, all the time growing up, there was piano on both sides.
Music, always music.
So my, both grandparents were ministers.
The Quaker, on the Quaker side,
my grandfather was a Quaker minister.
And on the other side, grandfather was a minister
in the Protestant churches.
And being in a small town,
he'd go from town to town to be a minister to different areas.
And my grandmother played the organ in all these different churches.
On the other side, on the Quaker's side, everybody played the piano.
I mean, everybody's good at it.
I was not that good at it.
But everybody else was good at it.
My grandmother, her daughters.
And it was always maybe three pianos being played.
being played at the same time by people in the family.
And yeah, on the Quaker side of the family,
it was, my grandparents spoke thee, thou, and thy.
So it was a whole different language there than it was elsewhere.
And so we were influenced by this.
And in fact, you may, I think I may have mentioned, but one of the
one of my favorite books was The Hana.
And it was about a little Quaker girl.
So that was one of the things.
But we always had books around us and music.
And did you, you mentioned that you weren't,
didn't consider yourself to be as good at pianist
as other people in your family.
But did you, did you enjoy music?
Did you enjoy reading all?
Oh, I loved music of all kinds.
But most of the background was classical music.
And, you know, but as I was growing up, I started liking things like Elvis Presley
and the doors.
In the words, I was sort of rebelling against that, but still, I was always around music,
and I always loved music.
I just was not a great, my sister's a concert pianist, so she's younger
and she put me to shame, so I decided this was not my thing.
So was it in the Upper Peninsula where you,
spent your high school years?
Yes.
Could you tell us a little bit about what those years were like for you?
Okay.
I'm not sure which angle to answer that at.
Maybe your life inside the classroom, was school easy for you?
Oh, school, I loved all courses, and I really liked school
because I liked my school.
because I liked my friends, I could see my friends,
and I remember always liking the teachers I had.
But school for me was fun.
I looked forward to it.
And I loved every court, I shouldn't say love,
that's a strong word.
I mean, math was my favorite,
and what I did not like was Homek
because girls were supposed to take it.
And again, it was rebelling against what we had to do.
to do. So that was my least favorite.
And did you have any particular hobbies or extracurricular pursuits?
You name the hobby. I had that hobby.
I did, I mean, you could just say anything.
Did you do this?
And I'll say yes.
Right.
I was in a choir.
I played in a band.
went horseback riding, like dancing.
In fact, I, yeah, I might think of a favorite one I haven't mentioned at this point,
but yes, I really like doing things.
I love playing baseball.
It was an all-boys team, but we were in such a small town
that they needed an extra player.
So they asked me if I would do it, and I was thrilled.
do it and I was thrilled.
What position did you play?
I don't remember.
I was not the best player on the team, but it was fun.
Could you speak a little bit to mathematics in your high school years or before?
And to the extent to which you can recall, what was it that, was there anything in particular
that attracted you to mathematics?
mathematics?
Yeah, I like the abstract side of mathematics, which was always the case.
So instead of memorizing things, I like to derive things.
Even when I had an exam, people would memorize them.
I would always feel safe because I could derive it to get the answer.
And also, I like algebra, geometry, logic.
I was not that fond of the applied side.
applied side as I was at the other side.
And I didn't like things like statistics as much as I liked the other side.
So I always stayed sort of abstractly thinking about things that was, and it's always
been the case.
Were you at all attracted to technology or science in these years?
I was good.
at it. But keep in mind, we were in a very small town. So whatever they taught, I would take.
I mean, I remember in biology, I didn't like seeing the heart of a frog on a board.
That was upsetting, but, hey, it was in the course. But yes, I took physics.
I mean, yeah, the things that they taught, we took. But I was not, nobody.
nobody pushed me in a certain way. There were just a few courses and you took what they had.
As you were approaching the end of high school, what were your, how did your thinking for yourself develop
about what you might do next and what you might do in life as a young person at that time?
Well, I definitely wanted to go to college because that's what you did in my family, both sides.
to the family. And so it was just what you did. You didn't really have to think about it.
Although my father, I did tell him in my rebellious way, I decided not to go to college.
He said, fine, that's okay. Well, I quickly changed my mind.
So that's, yes, and what did I want to be? I really wasn't sure.
I mean, my grandmother on one side was a journalist.
journalist. And my grammar, the other side was a musician.
My, because of my father, my mother was a teacher, as I said, and my father was a
philosopher. So I always thought I would like to get into something that was interesting.
But I also wanted to keep in mind that I had to make a living. So I had the two parts to weigh.
And do you recall where you explored going to college?
Well, yes, I do some of the things.
And by the way, a lot of things that influenced me, too,
is that I had worked on many jobs in high school and then going into college.
So that gave me an idea of the kinds of things that I liked doing.
So I had a little help from that.
that.
Would you mind telling us a little bit about those work experiences?
Well, I was always working because I wanted to earn money to go to the college that I wanted
to go to.
And we were not a wealthy family.
There were four kids.
And so if we wanted something, we had to earn it.
So I earned everything possible that I could, but saved up enough to go to college.
But I worked on many different jobs.
I waited on tables in a resort area.
But the most interesting job of all was when I worked at the Arcadian Copper Mine.
And when I worked there, it had been a copper mine, abandoned, turned into a banana mine
because it was 40 degrees, and so they could store bananas in there.
And this guy got this.
this bright idea of turning it into a tourist to go on tours.
So at the time, he hired me as a guide to take people on tours through the copper mine.
It was made of copper.
So anyway, I started taking people on tours, and they start off with like a family a day,
two or three people a day.
And then pretty soon it started growing.
And I had to start hiring other guides to work for me.
And by the end of that year, it was like at least a thousand people a day over the summer.
And so I had these guys working for me.
And one time, they went on strike because they weren't making enough money.
guides and so the person owned it his name is Arville Wally Tollo and I said
Arvel these guys are going to leave unless you get them a raise and by the way I
make the same thing that they do so could you give me a raise to and so I managed
to get a raise for everybody and then the people were coming in and then there was
I don't know whose idea it was but to sell copper jewelry
copper gifts, right? So pretty soon I took over a responsibility for that. I hired my
brother as the head guide and then hired people in the jewelry department, but since
Arville never had education above fourth grade and he owned like three Cadillacs and
he had money, he also let me handle the financial part of the business. And so over this several
years I was running the Arcadian Copper Mine to take people on tours for quite a long time.
Summers, you know, during both high school and college.
I also worked at Joe's Chicken Basket at nighttime when I was running the copper mine.
So you can see I got an idea of what you're getting into when you're going to work every day and for responsibility.
and, you know, what it means to have responsibility.
And all this started when I was 16, the copper mine.
And so that was, had major influence, I think.
It strikes me that that's a lot of trust that the owner of the mine with the fantastic name.
That's an unusual amount of trust to place in any young person.
young person.
Remember, he never went past fourth grade.
And he thought that what I did was all he needed.
And I felt the same way.
But remember, there's only like a family starting off a day and then several people starting off.
It might have been up to hundreds of people a day as it grew.
And it was one of the most popular tourist attractions.
And so I remember one time.
I remember one time when I had found a huge piece that's native copper, and this is the only place in the world where they have native copper.
It's pure, some half-breds with silver or whatever, whereas other parts of the world have copper, but it's not native.
They have to crush it to get the copper.
See, I still have something left from taking them on tours, right?
Yes.
But I remember finding this huge piece of native copper.
They've never seen anything that large before.
in the mine.
And so I decided, if you find it, it's keepers, right?
So I showed Arvo what I found.
And he said, no, no, that's too big.
Nobody gets to take one that big.
And I get really upset.
He said, okay, let me think about it.
And he came back and he solved the problem.
He did a Solomon solution.
He cut it in half.
So I still have half of that native copper.
copper. But yes, my life was very much in high school and college summers.
In college, I worked in what they call the scrape line cafeteria.
Okay? So we used to have all kinds of names for that, like train wreck or whatever.
This is college kids, right?
So I worked there. But I also, again, worked at nighttime on switchboard because I was like the phone
operator and switchboard and so it was a place where a lot of people would come at night
to pour out their problems because there I was telling me about this or that.
So I had a lot of friends and, you know, but I remember one time there was a water department,
but there were two water departments in the area.
And so, you know, they would call and they get, they would hear each other because I would plug them
them into each other. And they say, hello, this is such and such water department.
The other one says, no, I'm the water department. So I had fun with the switchboard,
as did the people who would come to visit. But I did that in the evenings and the scrape line.
Actually I did it during the daytimes too. And the scrape line, whenever there was a meal, I can't remember.
But both of them kept me busy.
in addition to studies. So again, I was used to working on things.
And was that with the bell system, the switch exchange, or was that on the campus?
It was the thing where you plug stuff in. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
You know, like you see these things with that comedian, you know.
Of course. Yes. Yes. So it was familiar to me. Yes.
Well, how did you decide where you wanted to go to college?
Well, first I went to the University of Michigan, okay?
And probably because I had a good scholarship there.
And, yeah, I think I had a good scholarship as the main reason.
I don't remember why I started there over something else.
I had scholarships, complete scholarships to other places like Stevens College,
but it was all women.
And I said,
said to my father, I don't have anything against women, but it's much more real world like to have everybody in the college, not just say because you're a girl, you're going here, or you're a boy, you're going here.
So I decided that was not a good idea.
I should be what it is like in the working world, a realistic situation.
So then after the University of Michigan, if you recall, it came from very small towns.
And it was a little big and not as personal.
I did well in my courses and had many great experiences.
But, you know, and there were things I did that decided what I might do next.
But I eventually decided, you know, after I've been there for a semester,
to go to Erlem and try out a smaller school.
Keeping in mind, I was so used to moving around, it was no big deal.
was no big deal to try this out and see, you know, what it was like.
But I remember when I was at University of Michigan, I studied really hard because it was
this big school and I came out of this little high school.
And so I was really worried and I stayed up many, many nights for the mathematics exam.
And all of a sudden it hit me, I hadn't studied for sociology.
study for sociology.
And it was like the night before, and I was being up all those nights,
I wasn't thinking clearly.
And I thought, I got to do something.
So I remember that night before the sociology exam,
I memorized the entire glossary.
And it was a blue book exam which said, what is man?
And I wrote this entire thing for whatever, two hours or so,
weaving in every term I had memorized.
And the sociology department called me in and said,
we think you should consider majoring in sociology.
So anyway, that was memorable.
But nevertheless, I decided to,
and Errolum had been a family school.
My mother, my aunts went there, my grandmother,
my grandfather went there.
Okay.
Yeah.
And it was Quaker.
So I thought I would try it out.
Had you been to the campus?
I mean, it wasn't Quaker.
Quakers started it.
Oh, sorry about that.
No.
Had I been to the campus?
Before?
I don't think so, but I heard so many stories.
My uncle went there.
Right.
I mean, going way back into the 1890 somethings, right?
And I'd hear stories about it.
Oh my goodness, so many members of my family went there.
Yeah.
Well, before you,
Before you, just about mathematics at Michigan, you know, how did you find that?
Were you encouraged by the mathematics experience that you had at the University of Michigan?
I did well.
I mean, I think I got all A's as far as I recall.
But don't check with the college.
I might have a bad memory.
But anyway, I did do well at it, and I was encouraged.
to pursue mathematics.
And yeah, and I took the courses, I don't remember which courses, but I took more than one.
And that was my major, let's put it like that.
Right.
And was I encouraged, nobody encouraged me to do anything like from the family side of things,
from the teachers, there were just these courses, and you said, I'll take that one and that one,
and nobody questioned you one way or the other.
encouraged or discouraged.
And I know that at Erlem, or I have read, that you also combined studies of philosophy with studies of mathematics.
Yes.
Did you begin that at Michigan as well, do you recall?
No, I didn't do it at Michigan, but it may not have been a course that was in the particular time.
But I did want, I really was fascinated.
Actually.
I may have thought about it because it's not clear, but I may have at that time majored in math
and had a minor in philosophy and religion, because come to think of it,
I think we visited in a religion course every kind of religion in the area in Ann Arbor.
So all kinds, you know, and I was fascinated by the commonalities between all the religions,
and then the differences.
And, yeah, it was, but I didn't think I'd make a very good living, studying religion.
So I had to balance it anyway, but somehow my father and I were convinced that philosophy and mathematics
were definitely connected.
So if I was an expert, either one, it would help the other, at least the kind I liked.
Right.
Yeah.
Um, well, before we get into your kind of how your education and mathematics continued
and philosophy continued at Erlum, I just wanted to ask about computing and computers.
Had they entered into your life in any way by this time?
Not in high school. We never heard of these things. In college, not until,
I think it was 1956 or 1957. I didn't hear about it from college, but I worked another
summer job. I worked for traveler's insurance as a student actuary because they paid
you to study, okay? And so you had to work part of the time, but then you took classes part
of the time. So what they put me into this room full of
Marshawn machines like mostly women in fact may have been all women in
their number crunching they were look they were like computers doing all the
statistical stuff which was not my favorite kind of thing to be doing and there
were several insurance companies in Hartford they'd all get out of the
each would get out of the different time because there was so much traffic so
let's say that travelers got out at 433 I mean was that odd
So everybody at just around 430, everybody in the whole place would watch the clock.
And then it would go to 33 and they'd rush out practically
stampeding. I remember sitting back there saying,
Oh my God, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life.
I couldn't believe how anxious they were, which I knew anyway that I didn't want to do it.
But it was just an experience that I remember.
I remember and then part of that experience was being called in by the VPs and the
EVPs wanting me to major and becoming an actuary.
And when I found out what was involved and the fact I did not like statistics, but they really
tried to get me to do that and I decided, no, I didn't want to do that.
But I had a great teacher at Erlum.
Her name was
Florence Long. She was a head in the math department. And it was having her, I think, for
the teacher that, I mean, she was so good at it. But she was also a wonderful human being.
She would invite all of our students, myself being the only woman and all the guys over to her house for cucumber sandwiches.
I mean, it was like a family kind of thing. But she was good. And I remember thinking, I want to do what she's doing.
I want to teach the kind of math.
mathematics, she's teaching.
And I think, and I want to teach it in college like she's doing.
So that major influence that was.
And she was, did you talk to her about that ambition or could she see it?
I don't know that I talked to her about it, but she really,
she really liked what I did in math class.
And of course, kids like to take it when people like what they're doing.
even if they didn't, right?
It was positive reinforcement.
So again, nobody said, well, except for the actuary people and the sociology people.
But with respect to math, you know, if you did well, you knew you were doing well.
Right.
But I wasn't like these people.
I'm driven just in the math direction where, you know, I have a nephew.
It's like, you name it, and he's a math whiz and everything math, but nothing else.
Right.
You know, it was not something that was meant to be in my head.
If I could ask you just one follow-up question about that experience at the Hartford,
the insurance company in Hartford.
Oh, I forgot to tell you.
Well, just to finish that thought, but that room filled with all the desktop calculating machines, you know, was this just like a gigantic open room with the loud clack of these?
Like a big auditorium, and in fact, I remember when it was clicked on 433, somebody'd be in the middle of a calculation in the Marshap machine, and they wouldn't even finish the number that they would.
were putting. It just went running out. That's how anxious they were to get out of there.
But I forgot to tell you why I brought this up. I brought it up because all of a sudden one
day word was going around travelers that there are these new things out there called computers
that were going to take away all of their jobs, all the people in the Marchant machines. Pretty
soon they wouldn't have jobs. And so everybody was talking about it. They were going to take away. They
were scared. They wouldn't have a way to make a living. But of course, it ended up being more jobs were created with the computers than there were with the Marchant machines.
But you had just heard about the computers.
Yeah, nobody talked about it. No. It wasn't, it was not where I went to school or, yeah. No, because they didn't have courses that concentrated on what we call software engineering or our brands.
of computer science. At the time, it was mathematics or physics, but more often mathematics, that was what we did.
So eventually that became important when they were looking for people in these fields when they became fields.
As you, as you reach the end of your time at Erlem,
and this picture of the end of your time at Erlem,
of becoming a mathematics professor like Florence Long.
What were you thinking about as your next steps?
Well, I wanted to go to graduate school,
and I received assistantships, scholarships, in various places.
But I'd heard there was good theoretical, abstract,
pure, whatever they used at the time, mathematics at Brandeis University.
But first, I was, I had
gotten married in the meantime in 58, and my husband at the time had one more year to go.
So I taught mathematics in junior high and high school in Boston, Indiana.
Another tiny place. And I remember I'd had pneumonia my senior year, and I was in the hospital
for three months with pneumonia, and I was in the hospital for three months with pneumonia, and I couldn't interview
for jobs because I was too sick.
And you can hear it had its influence.
So the principal and maybe he was ahead, I don't know who he was, but they came to the hospital
to do an interview for me, to be a teacher, a mathematics teacher.
And when they found out I had studied French for one year, they asked me if I would also teach
French.
And being young and not knowing what it was getting myself into.
I said, sure, why not?
So I taught mostly mathematics courses, but I did teach French in one course, in Boston High School,
while my husband was finishing his last year at her alum.
And when he finished, then you...
When he finished, then, he wanted to get a PhD in chemistry.
I wanted to get my PhD in math.
We both had...
scholarships.
Okay.
So then we had to decide, oh, let's see, in 1959, at the end of 59, I had my daughter, okay?
So now we had a family to support.
One of us went to school first and the other one afterwards.
So I don't know how we decided, but I probably said you do it and he said, no, you do it.
It was that kind of thing.
We both had intended.
that whoever was working would support the family,
and then the other would go to school and then do the opposite.
Now, when he was at Brandeis,
one of his friends was at Harvard Law School.
So he went to visit him in class
because he was intrigued by politics and law.
So he went there and said,
I think I would rather be a lawyer than be a chemist.
And he said,
I'm going to Harvard.
So I went to Harvard for a job, and they hired him, I'm not hired him, they, what's the word
admitted?
That doesn't sound right.
But he was accepted.
And so then we went, and then I was, you know, getting work so I could earn the money and
delay Brandeis until, you know, it was, until he had finished his law school.
law school. So I can't remember. I think that might have shortened his schooling because of the law school.
It might have been, I don't remember, but it was maybe a little less than graduate school and, you know, doing chemistry.
Well, what sorts of work did you initially find?
My first job was at MIT. I worked for Professor Edward Ann Lorenz.
at N. Lorenz professor in meteorology, and he wanted to hire somebody to do programming
for him. And I don't know how that happened with me. We found each other. Let's put it
like this. But I don't remember how that happened. And so I went to work for him.
One of the best things I ever did. And I hadn't really been near a computer before.
before. He had an LGP 30 in his office. And he had at least two PhDs, if not three,
neither. None of them, I should say, was in the field of computers and programming and software.
But he loved that computer. And he taught me everything he knew about the LGP 30. Well, he'd hand me something saying,
here's the instructions. That's what people used to do. Right. And, but he would show me the
things that, like for example, the LGP 30, it had a drum on it.
And if you kept writing instructions without skipping certain parts in the drum, it was slower.
So he showed me how to find the places, to move the code, to go to where it was faster.
And he was amazing. He was the most intelligent and one of the nicest human beings.
I went from Florence Long to professor.
Lorenz. I was lucky. And there were some times there I really remember.
I would worry about things if they didn't work. I didn't want him to know I made a mistake.
So at 4 o'clock in the morning, we were all at a cocktail party, not Professor Lorenz.
I and my friends, and all of a sudden I said, oh my God, I forgot to fix something.
something. I went at at 4 in the morning to his office, fixed it. The next morning,
said, what were you doing here at 4th morning? He calculated and went back on the equations
and figured out where I was and what I had done. And also, I was very impatient because it took so long
in the computer. If you made a change, then you'd have to wait for the paper tape to come out,
a new paper tape. I don't remember the paper tape.
I don't remember the details so much, but I figured out that instead of creating a new paper tape when I made a change,
if I punched a hole in it because it was in binary, I was programming in hexadecimal, but paper tape was in binary.
If I poked a hole in there, that was the way to get a one when it was a zero.
And if I put scotch tape over it, I could go the opposite.
So I said, take the paper tape all the way down the hall in the meteorology department.
and make my changes. And he thought that was so funny, but it made things go faster.
So that was my discovery.
So it was faster to cover up the holes with bits of tea.
To cover up the holes if it was a zero. I can't remember which way it was which.
Or to poke it with a pencil to create the opposite.
So I could change from one to zero. And so I could change from one to zero.
So I knew binary very well at the end of that, and I knew hexadecimal quite well as well.
What sorts of programs were you writing?
It was weather prediction programs, and the only people writing it were myself and Professor Lorenz.
And I learned another thing that the larger the matrices, the eigenvectors or whatever,
the longer it would take, and it took a long time in that computer.
So I would select the largest matrices to multiply before lunch.
And so, yes, and later on, years later, like maybe five years ago,
I realized that one of his well-known papers, he thanked me for all the program.
I never knew he did that.
That really meant the world to me.
Even to this day, that's how much I thought of him.
But he was...
He was, oh my God, he was very shy.
So would there be a hurricane, a big one?
He'd call me over, say, look, and we'd watch the hurricanes.
But at coffee time, if the cream was souring, he would say, oh, look at the convection currents.
And he would look at his curdled cream in the coffee.
He was a real gem.
And I would imagine with these weather simulations that
it would have to be sort of a collaboration to put whatever he was thinking about for the model
to get that, you know, with your collaborating with you into the computer.
Yes, yes.
Yes.
But I don't remember too much about it, except he was showing me how to do things.
Even, you know, we didn't have operating systems on that.
But he showed me what to do, get around it.
It's called an operating system today.
today, but I mean, a very, you know, small core size and knowing the difference between
the sink and the async kind of thing.
But I learned so much from him.
And again, his enthusiasm, as I like to say to people, was contagious.
I think I decided, after that I wanted to go into this stuff, but there was no field, but I really
I wanted to do the kinds of things that I learned from him.
And also, I worked over at Project Mac as part of working for him on the PDP1.
Could you describe that Project Mac scene?
That was a fascinating scene.
I used to take my daughter there as a baby.
She'd sleep. I work at nighttime. The hackers were all there.
So we all knew each other.
knew each other. And one time I went in, and my program was not working. I was really upset.
And when your kids, when you're beginners, you're never supposed to blame the computer,
because that's what beginners did when they were programming.
And I said, I know it's the computer. I just know it's the hardware.
It's not my software, right? So anyway, it turned out it was the hardware.
It was the hardware, and the hackers had done something to the hardware in the middle of the night.
And they changed it, not to make it not work, but I don't know for what reason.
So they now credit me with catching them in the act, and they weren't allowed to do whatever
it was they did anymore.
So there's a chapter that they talk about my coming in there, you know, ruining their fun.
So anyway, that was while I was working for Lorenz as well.
What was your role on that project, Matthew?
It was still weather prediction.
To put that on the PDP-1?
Yeah, on the PDP-1.
And what was the different, what was it like working on that computer versus the LGP-30?
LGP-30?
You know, as I would learn about computers, the big thing back then is what language do you know?
Okay, okay, what computer are you on?
And after I'd been on two or three computers,
I said, you've seen one language, you've seen them all,
meaning I could just see what's the difference.
Yeah, you had to learn the syntax, but not the semantics, right?
So I never really viewed it in my mind.
It became patterns or, but it wasn't like the PDP one.
assembly language versus the LGP 30, what is the, whatever it might be binary or hexadecimal
or whatever it was called that was on that computer.
I can't remember if it had a special name for some language.
that evolved. But yeah, so now when I say what's the difference, I would say what's the same,
you know? Right. But the environment with the hackers was fascinating because they would keep
bringing in pizza and they were all in MIT in class, but they all cut classes, right? But we'd be
there and my daughter would be sleeping away and I can't remember when this happened, but at one point
There was some program where they sat her down. I don't know if it's the hackers or the group over at the 704.
And they sat her down and had it talk to my daughter, say things, and it said she was bad.
It was, I think it's destroyed her to this day because she said, I'm not bad, you know.
But it was like a, it didn't talk to her. But the kids, and I call them kids, because I was at least two years old,
the kids would read to her what the computer would say.
Yeah.
And to tease her in essence.
Well, it was more like it was an experiment, a man-machine interface.
This was a girl machine interface, as to how it could relate to people.
Huh.
Yeah.
And was that Project Mac group?
Was that largely men?
Were you?
It was there other?
Oh, men.
And me.
But I was not on their project.
Well, their project was hacking, right?
But they thought of me as the establishment because I was not a hacker.
However, they considered me an exception because the way they talked about girls, they didn't
put me in that category.
I was a programmer.
I was a serious programmer.
programmer. I was there to build real systems, you know.
But I wasn't, I mean, the attitude towards women back then, that was the epitome of it with the hackers.
I mean, girls were to go out with, right?
But I don't think that they ever worked with them at that time.
And that wasn't part of the world.
Women were not in that field, if you will.
And I don't know what they did, you could call a field, but it was the beginning of part
beginning of parts of what the field became.
Right.
It strikes me that both with the LGP30 and then I suppose when you were working with the PDP1,
that you had an unusual introduction to computing from other people in that era
because you had these machines to yourself.
They were your...
Totally.
Yes.
In fact, some things get mushed together when you're
when you look back that many years.
But I also did some work in the PDP one, again, for the same project.
Out at Digital, it was their PDP1.
Out at digital in this warehouse, it was sitting on this dirt floor,
which the computer kind of like looked like it was going to fall over,
like the Leaning Tower Pizza.
And I was afraid to go in there because there were all these pigeons, and we were
all hearing about these bad diseases from pigeons, right?
And so I would, I think the computer at Project Mac was busy for a couple days, so I went,
drove out there and used that PDP one out there.
And there it was, the beginning of digital out in Maynard and running through the door really
fast past the pigeons, hung out.
Yeah.
Also, in listening to your stories, a lot of it's happening at night time.
Yes.
Was that your natural, were you naturally nocturnal?
Or was there something about the work or tearing to your daughter?
I was very dedicated to my work, conscientious.
I worked more hours than.
I mean, I was like the hackers that way.
I worked a lot.
But at night, I would always find a way to bring my daughter,
because it was after hours.
But at Professor Lorenza's lab, I worked normal hours.
Because I don't know, it was that way, but if I wanted to work at night,
I kind of, well, and it was the other computer, right?
So that's where I would go to work at work.
But yeah, I tended to have longer hours because I wanted to get the stuff done and I wanted to work.
I was always interested in making my systems reliable as part of it.
Let's see. Well, was it in, was it in, was it in 1961 that you started working over at Lincoln Laboratory?
That sounds about right.
Yeah. Could you talk about that move?
Yes.
Okay.
I wasn't, none of us made that much money at MIT as research, whatever they called us.
It meant we did technical work.
And it wasn't Professor Lorenza's fault.
That was just what you got when you were in that, if you worked in the university.
So I decide a better find a way.
a job where I could make more because not only did I have support the family,
but I wanted to go to Brandeis, so I was saving money for that.
So I saw they were advertising for programmers.
I don't know what they called people, but I think they were programmers then.
And this is a new thing.
They were starting to hire for programmers.
So I contacted them out in the Bedford, Lincoln, whatever,
I can't really remember where it was.
And this person, he said to me, we're really interested in having an interview.
He said, but please forgive me, he said, but I've only interviewed men.
And I do interviews in my hotel room.
And I can't do that with you because you're a girl.
He said, would it be okay if we had an interview at the bar and the hotel?
I said,
Sure, that's fine.
So we had a drink.
Well, I had this interview, and I was hired.
And so anyway, so I was hired to work on the ANFSQ7.
The XD1 was the first ANFSQ7,
and it was at Lincoln Labs.
Okay, and one of the first things that happened when I was there,
And remember, what counted was the language, if you knew the language,
and you'd worked on that computer.
And I didn't know it, so you went to school to learn the instructions
and what they did.
That's what they taught instructions.
Nothing about patterns or engineering, you just learn the instructions,
and then you're off on your way.
So they'd start to have courses on learning the instructions.
And I think it's the computer, usually the computer,
usually the company that has the computer that would teach it.
So anyway, there was this, oh, and when he interviewed me,
it was important for them to get programmers, there was a shortage.
So I told him I couldn't travel.
I had a dog, a little girl, and I could not go away.
He said, whoa, but we have this course, which goes on.
Could you at least go to the course?
It's out of town.
I said, no, but I'll make a deal.
I'll learn as much, if not more, than all the people took the course.
And I said, you'll see.
So everybody went to the course.
I don't remember it's six to eight weeks.
And I stayed back by myself at where, you know, our offices were.
And by the time they got back, I had done the majority of the work.
of the work that needed to be done.
And that was one of the things.
And then the first assignment that they would give to people,
because they had a problem, they're programmers,
because people were hiring now in different places.
So you had to keep your people that were already trained, right?
But one of the biggest problems is everybody prided themselves
on tricky programming.
So if you couldn't understand what you wrote,
what they wrote, they really liked that.
They were geniuses, right?
So this one guy, his first name was Ernie,
he had written this, he was good,
he was a good programmer, and he left.
And now the problem with the tricky programming
is that nobody knew what it did
because it was not only no comments, no nothing,
but it was tricky.
So when you'd come to work,
it was a challenge that they'd give to the people they hired
to learn this program and figure it out.
So of course that was one of my first assignments
and they gave it to me
and I just had to figure this program out.
Okay, so, and I thought,
and later on, whenever I write a program,
I'm going to put comments down because this
this is not right what they're doing.
So anyway, I learned the program enough
that over the Sage system on the XD1,
I learned enough about it to try to run it, okay?
And started to see maybe I had to make a couple change.
I don't remember, it's foggy in my mind.
But anyway, I got it to start running,
and it actually printed out.
And it's kind of like, you know, when you're trying to print something
that's heavy with graphics.
Well, all of a sudden it started making noises
like it was printing.
Nobody had gotten it to print before.
So we all went running over to see it,
what it had printed, and it was,
all the comments were in Latin and Greek.
In the words, this is the tricky programmer, right?
But it ran.
Okay, but the Sage computer and everything around it was fascinating.
fascinating. Like, for example, if you had a program that my program was a radar program
looking for enemy, looking for noise, enemy airplanes. And if you, if the computer
crashed, this is this huge computer, if it crashed, the only information you were given
was what the location, the register that it hung up in with some numbers.
Okay, that's all you had. So I thought, and so what I realized, oh, and then, when it hung up,
they knew whose program it was, because there you were, running your program, and all of a sudden,
if it would crash, bells and whistles really loud, everybody could hear it, flashing lights,
and then it's like, and you're standing there like they caught you, right?
The computer operas were kind of rushing out, the other programmers said,
Margaret, what did you do?
So that, so anyway, one of the things about my program, the one I spent the most time on, not Ernie's, but my own,
was whenever it ran, it sounded like the most beautiful seashore, and people come listen to it was music.
I didn't write it to sound that way, but it just happened to sound like a seashore.
To all of us, we called it the Seashore program.
And one night, everything happens at 4 in the morning in my life,
but one night at 4 in the morning, I got a phone call at home,
and it was the computer operator,
and he said, Margaret, something terrible has happened to your program.
I said, what happened?
And he said, it doesn't sound like a seashore anymore.
So I drove in, and I figured out the problem, we put it back up,
and everybody said, oh, thank God it still works, right?
But it was like that kind of camaraderie.
that kind of camaraderie between us and the computer operators,
and we'd send them out to play ping-pong,
because we liked the power of running this computer.
And we just thought, oh, it'd be fun to do what they're doing.
And then you'd go into this room and see the tracking the planes.
And it was dark, but you'd see the lights and colors, just like Star Wars.
You know, it was an amazing thing.
thing to be there.
What was making producing the sound of the waves?
The computer.
Just fans?
Don't ask because I'm not a hardware guru.
But it wasn't like a speaker or something.
No, no.
No, I don't know.
You're asking me a question that I...
It's funny, this guy who worked for me in this company,
he's a professor now, said,
God, that's great.
We're starting to debug things by sound now.
And it had something to do with whatever, the mechanics of the computer that they had,
were building in the class.
He teaches computer science.
But, yeah, there were different sounds depending on what you ran.
But it was just, like when my program sound the way it did, it just happened.
I didn't make it happen.
Right.
Yeah.
And was your program to take the radar information and
And find, like, the signal of an aircraft in that?
Well, either it's an aircraft or it's noise.
Right.
So we had to separate it out and find the tracking of the actual plane.
And I don't remember that much about it.
But, yeah, most everything had to do with tracking and looking for enemy airplanes.
And was that this Seashore program, did that go into the SAGE system as it was deployed?
In my opinion it did. I didn't go to upper management and say, did you use my program.
But whatever it was, it was part of the system that we submitted.
And the, here yet was another programming language, right?
And we used to use it in talking to each other.
Like, I'm going to branch left minus around the hallway.
There was a branch right, I remember the terms, because we talked the dialect, right?
We had a lot of fun.
It was because we were just totally,
in all these jobs, including this one, total freedom.
But it's funny, we were all very serious at the same time.
But we had fun, you know, it was, and there was mostly men,
but there were women there too when everybody was hired.
And more recently, I talked to one of them who said,
oh yeah, you were the expert.
Well, she probably came six months after I was there,
But yeah, and we would all go to lunch at the same time.
And we were like college kids, right?
And we all got along.
And I remember one of the guys there,
he wasn't used to having a woman there
number one and number two with a child.
Now, I wasn't there with the child,
but my daughter was home.
So he said, how do you know,
can you do this? How can you work here when you have a baby at home?
And I remember, I'd not been asked that before.
I said, well, you know, you have to do what's right for you
and I have to do what's right for me.
He said, oh, okay.
So, but that's, you know, it was unusual.
The whole thing was unusual for the madman era.
Did the, did the,
Did the importance of Sage to kind of like the whole Cold War, you know, defense of the nation,
did that, did the place of, did the place of Sage within that whole Cold War context,
did that, did that weigh on you or did that, how did that feel?
I just don't remember.
Um.
different feelings at that time.
I do know, when I was growing up,
in the Quaker side of things,
conscientious objectors were parts of the family.
However, no doubt some members of that side of the family
were in World War II,
and my father was in the Navy during the war,
and both of his sisters, one was a whack and one was a wave,
safe, so, and speaking of which to do with the war, and I know I'm going off here,
but I do remember, another favorite book was the upside downtown,
and so if you went to the other side of the world, everything was upside down.
That's what the book was.
So China was the other side of the world, we were told.
And I remember one day in Bloomingdale, I think,
Indiana. I remember digging for China.
All of us were digging, trying to find the upside downtown.
And all of a sudden, all the bells, just like Sage Computer, right,
but the whole town bells were ringing, noises, everybody was tooting their horns.
And this was 1945 was it?
The war was over right then and there, and we were digging for China.
Speaking of war, but back on the sage system, which is what you're asking about,
I mean, there obviously was a Cold War kind of thing going on,
but I don't remember, I mean, there were certainly conversations that went on,
people we hung out with, and part of what you did was you had a good time to forget the bad parts of things.
I mean, you know, I mean, there was a lot of people who were self-made comedians in the group.
People, I mean, they were really very bright people, but we didn't really talk about the politics that I recall.
It was at home we would talk about things.
I would imagine that that experience of standing in front of the Sage computer running
your program and fearful of the lights and clangs and bells and everything of a crash or an unsuccessful program.
That would be a very visceral training in software reliability.
Oh, totally.
And the thing is, speaking of that, it occurred to me because one of the problems was you'd have it
have it hang up and people write down or whatever, but we couldn't remember who was by which error.
So I think I came up with the idea of saying, because they had a Polaroid camera there,
just had come out, right, of taking a picture of the programmer next to his error.
Okay, so here's the Sage computer with the register, long register,
and you stand and pose with the error.
Well, pretty soon, we were all getting carried away, told the operators,
go play in the ping pong again, and the guys would pose with the mum,
mop on his head. So we had different errors with different pictures of us. We had fun with the errors.
But another thing is, when we then tried to find the error in something, I started to actually document,
not just my stuff, but some of the stuff I had worked on.
They thought that was so funny that I put comments beside the code.
Why do you put comments beside the code when you can just read the code?
I said, remember Ernie?
the guy who, right?
So anyway, people started to do documentation much more, and maybe that became.
And then, yeah, there were certain steps we took.
Not, I mean, certainly the sound helped us know where we were,
because it might have changed in certain areas.
But yeah, reuse, we begin to reuse things, not like we do now, but it
It was the beginning of something other than just learning the instruction and knowing what it did.
And it's interesting. I had never really thought about that careful comment and documentation as a method for reliability.
Yeah, yeah.
That's why I started to do it because I thought I could forget my own code because I've been tricky.
Now I'm going to trick myself.
Right.
Fascinating.
Well, could you talk about your transition, you know, from Lincoln into the Apollo program?
And I guess at the time that would have been the instrumentation laboratory at MIT?
Yes.
I found out about the Apollo program.
I'm not quite sure how I found out.
I was working at Lincoln Labs in that area.
in that area, so it could have been.
But I think, again, it came out in the news that they had won a contract,
and they were looking for people to work on it at Draper.
And so I thought, you know, I guess I should delay graduate school again,
because I'd like to work on this program that puts all these men on the moon.
You have man on the moon, right?
They say, first time they'll put, this is what it was about.
So I went in, and I had two interviews.
As soon as I heard about it, I went in for the interview.
And two interviews from different sides of the lab.
And so they asked me a lot of questions like you do,
but they weren't what I was expecting.
One question was, what did they know about some kind of mathematics
that they were into, aeronautical,
kinds of stuff. I said absolutely nothing.
And so then they asked me what jobs I had in high school years and college,
and I told them about some of the jobs, including the Arcadian Copper Mine.
They were fascinated with the fact I'd had this experience.
And so anyway, that very same day, each one decided on the spot to hire me.
to hire me. When I had two people offering me a job, and I thought, oh my God,
I know which one I want, but I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, I'll just tell them to
decide and they flipped a coin. And the one that won was the right one.
The one that you had wanted.
Yeah, that went into the flight software, the onboard flight software.
If the coin had gone the other way...
Don't even ask.
What would, what was the other job?
Oh.
Well, the other job had to do with support systems.
It was software, but it wasn't the onboard flight software.
This would have been all this...
It was like building up, you know, a facility where you did simulation on the ground.
But it was only later on I thought, I really did do the right thing.
Because there's where all the drama was, right?
I mean, well, first of all, I wanted to be part of the going to the moon and landing on the moon eventually.
But, boy, if I knew now, then what I knew now, I would have just accepted it.
But I was so afraid of hurting somebody's feelings, you know, that was uppermost.
Was that, was that, I mean, I can appreciate, you know, the thrill of that challenge
of getting a person to the moon for the first time.
Had you, was there anything in your...
Anything in your background that may have made that vision and that challenge particularly interesting?
Like had you been into astronomy or science fiction or anything like that?
Oh, I was into science fiction.
But one of my dear friends from Erlund said, you were always talking about going to the moon.
I was, I said, in college.
And he kept insisting I was.
I don't remember it, but he remembered it.
Fascinating.
He just sort of went back and connected them somehow.
But, yes, I was interested in physics at the time.
I was the only woman in the physics class also.
And at the time, I think the professor thought women should not be taking physics.
Because he, well, you have to know the times, right?
So I think he wondered why I was taking the class.
But I just said, because I want to take it.
You know, that was the only time.
somebody in college question that that might not be something I would be able to make use of.
But I ignored and went on.
Very good.
Well, so can you describe for us the coin flips the right way?
Yes.
You know, it's software for the onboard computers for Apollo.
Yes.
You know, what was it like getting started and
But there was all these engineers, okay?
Hardware engineers, aeronautical engineering, all this.
I mean, a lot of them out of MIT, okay.
But the whole idea of software and programming,
in fact even Dick Batten, Dr. Batten,
when they told them that they were going to be responsible for the software
software, and by the way, that has many different meanings, the word software.
He went home to his wife and said he was going to be in charge of software,
and he thought it was some soft clothing.
And the words, it was a term that was unfamiliar to the hardware people at the time.
Okay, so anyway, it was all the engineers and everything,
and they were starting to work on the unmanned missions.
And there's a few very interesting experiences on there,
but one that comes to mind,
because there are too many experiences,
is that there was this one thing that they were worried about
what if the mission aborts.
And I don't remember which mission,
because I don't remember absolutes, just relatives, right?
And what if it aborted and everybody said,
it's never going to, it just won't happen?
Oh, well, good.
We'll give this one to Margaret because she's a beginner and is never going to go there anyway, right?
Right.
So I wrote this program in the software that it would go to if there was an abort.
And sure enough, it aborted.
So it went to this program I had written, which I named Forget It.
And all of a sudden I became an overnight expert, because they couldn't figure out what went on
because I wrote the program in that part that it went to,
and they called me in and find out and everything.
So just like the sage system with its bells and whistles and sounds and lights and everything,
that made a real mark on me.
My God, this stuff I'm working on, this could be heard about, you know, beyond this room.
And I better make sure this is on hindsight now.
I do everything in my power that would work.
Well, forget it worked.
But the fact that it actually aborted, I mean, these guys never thought they were going to make a mistake.
So we could all make mistakes, right?
So anyway, then after that, oh, and then another thing, I would hear these guys, all guys, right?
And they walk around and say, how did you solve that problem?
And somebody else said, I used the Agu Kugo method.
And I thought, I never heard of the Agu Krugo method.
I've got to find out what this is.
I can't let them know.
I don't know the thing that they keep talking about all the time.
But I couldn't find out what it was.
So finally.
I said, what is this Agi-Kugel method that you all talk about using when you solve problems?
Turns out it means eyeballing in German.
So it's just scanning, going through the listing, you know, understanding what's going on.
So, I mean, these are just memorable, you know, that I learn, if you don't know, ask.
Ask questions.
Don't be afraid to ask a dumb question.
There is not a dumb question.
What's important is to learn what you need to learn.
And so anyway, so then I started getting involved.
Again, unmanned mission at worrying about, you know,
people started to, you know, people were working engineers,
but people began to be hired for doing programming.
Well, I may have been the only one for a while.
And I had all these bosses, they were all engineers, right?
But then they, we started.
to hire and the engineers would, I know I'm exaggerating, but they would, we would
be behind this wall and they'd throw their requirements over the wall and just expect
everything is going to start working, right? Because that's what the people did back
there. They made it work on the computer, right? And so it would just magically start
to work. Well, I started worrying about working on the area.
where you worry about how these different algorithms, once becoming software, or even before, interface with each other.
You know, you start, soon I got into it, because of man, but into the man missions.
We went from a synchronous executive environment to an asynchronous, and then who was more important?
And were they in conflict?
And where the interface is really interfacing, where they communicated?
right? And what's going on with what? And if this guy, meaning program, I'm going
back, is using these erasables, then this guy can't use them. So you got to worry about sharing,
but not at the same time, because it was multi-programming, not multi-processing in the software
itself. So I got into this area which we called the system software, which had to do with
all the worrying about the interfacing and what the priority should be in the system.
of the programs in the onboard flight software. And so I started to learn about things
like people submitting their programs and some of the engineers that would hand their, throw
it over the wall is what we called it. They would be perfect. It would always, they would do everything
right. They'd follow our rules that we came up with as we went along the way. But others,
were brilliant people, but they always made a lot of mistakes.
So one of the things I was responsible for in this area making sure that they spent more time
on the brilliant people making mistakes than the other people that did not make mistakes
because it was much more taking advantage of the resources of going in there.
So anyway, so I concentrated in the system software and then gradually took on, in addition,
to the system software, the command module software.
And by the way, the system software was shared by the command module software and the LEM software.
So it would go along for the ride wherever it was going.
It was like being an operating system environment at a higher level.
Everybody went through it.
So we remember one time I was letting or getting it.
or getting a release out. We had a release every day.
With the command module, one for the lamb, okay, and each had the system software in it.
So anyway, I remember I put a change in in the system software area.
It might have been display routines, it might have been restart,
might have been changing a priority.
But I put it in in the day's release, my own coding, and everybody,
hung up. Everybody. They were standing outside my door saying, my program's not working.
What did you do to the program? Well, since it was a systems area, everybody was hit by it.
So I came up with, I came up with this new thing. It was called offline version.
Okay, so until you were happy that your change worked in the offline version, you don't put it in
the main and that was because of the mistake I made that I decided to come up with the concept of offline versions.
So it was the temp version.
And then also started writing memos.
It's like emails today. You might send the email to 400 people, right?
You'd have to give it to the secretaries and they deliver it hard copies to 400 people.
Okay.
So every day it would say this went into it.
say this went into the assembly and everything.
So anyway, so I'm jumping around because of my memory.
But going from being responsible for system software to system software plus the command module
and around the Apollo 8 time, which was only using those really in flight, taking over all
of the onboard flight software before, just around Apollo 8 time and then taking on all
so all the man missions.
now I had to worry about the onboard flight software.
So it was a gradual taking on more responsibility,
but always keying in on everything from a systems of systems viewpoint.
And always being aware of everything that's going on,
I mean at a higher level, not everything that's going on.
Right.
at the level of, I'm trying to think of the term, but being in control,
making sure that everything was in control,
and working together and interfacing and so forth.
Was everyone working on this, the onboard flight software?
Were they all in the same place, physically?
We were all in the same building.
building, okay, on the river.
Okay.
But now there's the onboard flight software group, which were software people.
The way I use software, it's the stuff you write that runs on a computer.
That's the target for the application.
I have to say that because people use it so differently, especially back then.
But so in the group, the people who were doing the system software, taking,
taking requirements for engineers and doing application software
and worrying about the integration and the look, accepting it into the version and all of that.
That was a group of about, and this is my group, in its heyday,
around the times of Apollo 8, Apollo 11, was about 100 people.
But we had 3 to 400 guests, G-U-E-S-T-T-T-T-E-S-T,
people who submitted code, and once it became part of the assembly, it fell under our responsibility.
So you might have a navigation expert or a hardware expert trying to do something,
but if they decided to put it into the release, they wanted to do it themselves,
okay, it might be like a primitive operation, we call it nowadays, an app or something.
Okay, then they had to go through.
our group and each mission, like aid is a mission, 11's a mission, had two,
what we call assembly control supervisors or otherwise known as a rope mothers.
Okay, and that was named after the fact that they eventually were shipped off to
right then to get to become frozen modules, right?
Hardwareized or firmerized.
Anyway, so all at the same time, you'd have
a rope mother for the command module for the, for let's say, eight, and one for the lem for eight.
And at the same time, you'd maybe have 11 going on with the two rope mothers.
You had many missions going on at once.
And you had the system software modules that were shared in both the lem and the command module.
So you can imagine the amount of care that had to be taken to be taken to
to make sure everything worked with everything else and that all the rules were followed.
So for example, one of the most common mistakes that was made we realized was that you transfer control
from this location to something, another location.
So we'd just say TC to plus 8.
What?
Well, we had these dex4.
of cards we'd work with and then somebody would slip a card like yourself and no longer
plus eight was no longer plus eight.
Well, that was a major breakthrough.
Change plus eight and give it a name, right?
That's an example.
So then the Roke Mothers would, they'd look over stuff like the G-U-E-S-T-S-T-S
would often make mistakes because they weren't into worrying about
it other than their algorithm working in most cases.
And they didn't care how it worked with the other guys.
They didn't care if their priority was more or less important than somebody else's, okay.
And so if their program like guidance or whatever was working, they'll say,
oh, well, I did guidance, but you have tasks that could interrupt them,
and you have jobs that can interrupt jobs.
So it wasn't just the job.
this piece. It was this piece being interrupted by this one, being interrupted by this one,
and it was a whole different story to the softer people. It still is.
Well, before we took our pause, we were talking about the rope mothers and integrating
these contributions from the various guests and the different...
By the way, that's my name.
It wasn't generally used.
or it might have been in the in-group.
Oh, no, here comes another guess.
But no, that was not written up as a formal term.
Right.
Yeah.
They just were not in the group.
They were in another group.
With this whole, the process of developing each day's release, I suppose,
of taking these new contributions, checking things out,
the system with the rope mothers, was this kind of orchestration?
Was that your creation?
I did not come up with the concept of rope mother.
I don't know, I mean, I don't know how that name came up,
but I did not invent the term.
Well, we used to use assembly control supervisor.
But, yeah, there were other, the rope mother might have come up,
definitely.
from one of the guys. It's the same thing.
Assembly Control Supervisor and Rope Mother.
In terms of the overall organization of the project,
was that something that was like a known form for handling projects of this type?
Or was that invented as you went?
Most of the things we did grew up.
They were, it's not clear.
It's not clear.
what started what, but on the onboard flight software,
because there's all these other groups, right,
like hardware groups or whatever,
or simulation groups,
a lot of things we checked for,
we got smarter as we went along.
And the way we got smarter was to make a mistake
and learn from it, acknowledge it,
and say, that's not going to happen again,
that kind of thing.
But eyeballing, oh, and I should mention too,
I should mention, too, the most famous eyeballer is John Norton,
who worked on a V&V company, not North of Grumman,
but one of the V&V, who would take our stuff and go over it,
and he would Nortonize it.
He would use the Aga Kugo method, and he would catch things as well.
But we wanted to get, find it before he did.
And you mentioned for some of the, when you were describing,
you know, the kind of addressing and transfer control plus eight,
that you were using punched card decks to do this work.
Well, actually, the programmers, those of us, we would write things by hand on coating sheets,
then we would give them to key punchers who would punch them.
And I had great experience with the person who did the majority of key punching on my
stuff, because she would catch things.
She was a key puncher, and she was a black woman.
earning a living, I think she had a kid or two at that time, and then she went on to school
and became a doctor. So you could see she was going to do something besides punching cards
or being, there were secretaries back then too. I think we're all secretaries now, but there
are people, that's what they did, right? And now we've all been anointed with that. But
But she, yeah, and so the secretaries would oftentimes say,
I'm sure you want to use that word, you know.
So you learned from them, right?
Especially if you listen to them, you learn.
Were you using one of the mainframes on campus?
Or what was your computer for the project?
The AGC, the Apollo guidance computer.
The actual computer that's going to go on board.
Okay, several forms of it. There's the computer which could be sitting in a hardware simulation.
Right.
There's the computer which could be simulated by the software on a big mainframe kind of thing.
And there's, let me just see.
Oh, and then we used to, we could take the computer, we'd run software simulations.
In fact, we'd run those every night.
And then we'd run hardware simulations with the actual computer sitting there.
But it was the same computer that flew up there to the moon, the Apollo guidance computer.
So you had one in the building, I'm sorry.
Yes, yes.
Oh, fascinating.
Right.
So, yeah, in fact, on the hardware simulation, we can actually not be computer,
but we would run simulations where we ran
one of the computers. So that's what it was. Now you ask about other things on campus.
Yeah, we'd run some, like downstairs. There's upstairs people and downstairs people,
and they're totally different people. We never knew each other hardly, except that I remember running
downstairs and really upset at them because I couldn't get some of our stuff run on the computer.
And we only had turnaround once a day.
So I went down there and I said, we're not, we don't have enough time, we've got deadlines,
I can still remember, and he said, Margaret, it's only your people who are running on
our computer.
It's like, so we were stepping on ourselves.
Yeah.
I have read, but please correct me if I'm wrong, that in the, at least initially, in the plan,
for Apollo and the use of the Apollo guidance computer,
that really, there hadn't been a proper allotment
or estimation of the amount of work involved
to create the software.
Is that...
Oh, that's entirely possible.
That's the case on any software project.
So to say that, I'd say I'm surprised
if there had been the opposite.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Yes.
Well, um...
Maybe we could talk about some of the greatest, you know, challenges in developing the onboard flight software.
Well, some people bring up the size of the computer and how many registers and, you know,
as I probably said something like that before, those are all absolutes to me.
I think, do I have enough or not, right?
But...
In other words, it was not a lot of room to do the things that we do today,
but by being very careful how we designed and program things,
we were able to be quite clever.
I guess some of it you would call tricky programming.
In fact, Norton, the guy I mentioned the eyeballing person,
and I were going to have a meeting one day,
and we both were known for tricky programming at that time,
but we both changed our ways over time.
But, you know, you could...
You could find a way to scrunch it, right, by tricky programming.
But one of the things we did, which made it error prone, was to have to share the erasables,
because there's a fixed memory and the erasable memory, and you can't have two programs sharing it
at the same time.
And that happened a couple times, but it wasn't supposed to, and it caused a lot of trouble.
But anyway, that was a way of saving.
But it made it more work.
to worry about and then by tricky programming did it take more time than it should have
or were something so accurate it wasn't needed so there's all these trade-offs that had to go on.
But there was always one thing that stood out in my mind being in the onboard flight software
was that it was man-rated, meaning if it didn't work, a person's life was at stake, if not over.
That was always uppermost, in my mind, and probably many others as well, had been man-rated,
and it had to work the first time.
You couldn't fly the astronauts up there, because it was man-machine interfacing with the astronauts.
So you had to do it before the fact, meaning you had to simulate it,
either in the hardware or the software simulation, and hope that your simulation.
that your simulations covered everything.
So you simulated all kinds of things.
You could simulate the software, of course,
or use the AGC.
You had to simulate the astronaut, man-machines,
the astronaut working with the software.
You had to simulate the hardware.
and the world outside of it.
So you had the hope that you simulated everything so it
everything, so it was as much like the real thing as you could get it to be.
So you also had to worry that your simulations were correct from another standpoint,
and actually in one case, it said it didn't work in the simulation when it really did work
when they tried it out in the real world, in the real world on the ground, or vice versa.
In the words, the simulation gave the wrong answers, so you made the wrong
conclusions.
So what drives what?
It's like fake news, right?
Fake results, right?
Everybody says, oh, you made a mistake over here in the software
because the simulator says so.
But, so you change the simulator,
excuse you change the software,
and then in other words, either way you could make it,
the crossbreeding of mistakes.
So there's the single point
error and you're carrying it all the way through and I'll talk about that a little more
and another, a little later when we worry about that kind of thing about carrying the errors
all the way through.
When did the actual astronauts come into this kind of preparation and development of the software?
You, where you...
The astronauts trained in Houston with Mission Control
guys, but they could, they also could use the simulation, they could do the simulation
just, and they did, they ran simulations.
In fact, I remember when some of the astronauts came up to Draper, to MIT,
and we were running the simulation, showing them how it worked.
And I remember we ran the simulation and all of a sudden it came crashing down.
And I realized.
we'd put the wrong numbers in at the beginning.
You know, and they were watching us run.
It's like, okay, we can't do that again.
And I think we, I mean, this is just insimulating, right?
There has to be a check to make sure that we start off correctly.
Right.
But anything could go wrong, you know.
But that's a time when we all went out to dinner with several of the astronauts
who had come up to watch.
And that's a whole other story, but it was a very traumatic time
because they got into an automobile accident coming back from the restaurant.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
I just remember it well, not just because of the simulation,
but something more dramatic took place after the simulation.
But it helped me to forget what happened in the simulation.
Was everyone okay?
Everybody ended up being okay.
but one of the Draper guys got beat up a little bit.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
I just couldn't, I just thought of that.
Well, maybe for, it would be helpful to have you explain
the job that the Apollo guidance computer did,
and by extension, the software created for it,
just in terms of these manned Apollo missions.
Right.
Well, basically, I would divide it probably into three parts.
One part is the guidance navigation control,
and the requirements would come in from the different experts in those areas.
So you'd have P programs like landing,
and you'd have several programs that would do these guidance navigation control functions.
Those were the programs, but then the astronaut would have things that he could look up.
We'd call them extended verb.
extended verbs.
And so in the middle of that, you could look up values or put values in, that sort of thing.
Another thing, well, the system software was key as to where our expertise came in,
and that's putting it all together so that it would work, the applications.
And then worrying about man-machine interface where you'd present displays to the astronauts,
and they'd come back in.
So there was that interface, the man-machine interface.
interface.
And then, of course, there was the whole integration part that went on where we'd have
to, with the rope mother, making sure it was done correctly, but actually doing it.
So for example, you'd have to decide how to, what priority to put on all the different
things that were going on at the same time.
And every priority was unique.
So let's say I wanted to send out an emergency.
emergency and you had priorities like 10 and 20 and now you've got 20 going on because
control is a higher priority than guidance, which is a higher priority than navigation.
But now you want to interrupt.
And also there's other things going on all at once.
You've got to make sure emergency is higher than any of them
so that it can just stop everybody.
Everybody, because only one job could go on at the same time, but a higher party could interrupt it and take over.
So you couldn't have two software jobs going on at the same time.
However, I always viewed it as they're there at the same time.
So it's like they really are going on at the same time.
One is just kind of asleep and the other one's awake, but they're both there, so I had to worry about it.
I mean, me, we, and the system.
we and the system software.
So there was all of that involved.
But anything to do with the astronauts' interaction,
that was the computer on both the command module and on the limb.
So if something went wrong, guess who had to worry about it,
those of us in the AGC.
Well, maybe could you, could you
Can you tell us about the first, thinking about man-rated software, can you tell us about what it was like for you the first time that the astronauts actually flew, you know, with your software on these computers?
Apollo 8?
Yeah.
What was that like for you?
Where were you?
What?
An Apollo 8.
Well, yeah, I might get certain things a little mixed up, but Apollo 8 was very memorable.
It really was the command module that was involved in Apollo 8.
But this is the one where we were running simulations.
They were hardware simulations, and I used to bring my daughter in to work nights and weekends.
And she would see me pretending I was the astronaut and running a mission.
I would pretend I was doing what they did.
So she wanted to do it too.
And that's when she actually started doing keys, watching her mother,
and she started doing it.
And the whole thing came crashing down.
The mission crashed.
And I thought, oh my goodness, I can't ignore this because this could happen
in a real mission.
So I checked it out to see what was happening.
And she had selected the pre-launch program when it was in flight,
which meant...
that two programs were sharing the same eraseable, okay?
And so I came back and told people about it,
and there's, you know, the project managers,
we had a matrix management set up,
and the project manager is one for the limb,
one for the command module,
where the interface between us and Houston, right?
And I said, and it was like, it kept worrying me, and I kept saying,
we've got to put a fix in there,
so that if anybody tries to select P-O-1 during flight,
if the astronaut makes a mistake,
it's going to say, no, you can't do that.
You selected P-O-1 during flight.
And the powers that be, I don't know if it was the project manager
who didn't want to take it to Houston or Houston or whatever,
they didn't want to put that in because they were,
were worried about extra code,
and the astronauts would never, ever make a mistake, quote unquote.
So I remember arguing and saying,
but we all make mistakes.
Even astronauts could make a mistake.
So this was this ongoing thing,
and I knew what the change should be.
And so I said, okay, can we at least put a program node in there?
If this should happen during flight,
that they can look it up, and the process
program note will tell them what happened and I'll tell them what to do about it.
So I remember writing the program note, I wrote it and submitted it, and it said,
do not select P-O-1 during flight end.
Well, wouldn't you know, after I was able to get that in,
because it becomes part of their specs at that point or requirements, whichever,
they did it.
They selected P-O-1 during flight, and that was the Apollo one.
And that was the Apollo 8, oh, what happened, you know?
So they then, it was during navigation, so they'd put all the star.
I think they were putting, if I remember, star 1, they were supposed to be putting in and they
put P-O-1, you know.
So anyway, do I remember Apollo 8?
I remember Paul, eight, yes.
So the fix was to restart the computer and then you had to send all this navigational information up?
Well, no, the computer didn't have to be restarted.
You could even sit there and do dummy job and nothing,
and you can key in and start stuff and everything,
because it was interactive.
But they had to then start putting the data back in
that they had destroyed,
because the pre-launch program came on,
and that's, you know, lift-off kinds of stuff,
and it came on when you were in navigation.
So anyway, they just had to put back the data,
and it took a while.
But right after that flight, I was
allowed to put that fix in there.
Where were you while the mission was going on?
Apollo 8?
I was in the scammer room and we were pouring over the listings, you know, these green-bound books,
and we were looking up, there was the project manager and the, there were three of us, I
remember, going through it, trying to find out what happened.
I said, it's the Lauren bug.
I know it's the Lauren bug.
This is exactly what happened.
So anyway, it was the Lauren bug.
So you were essentially on call in your normal office?
This was a scammer room, which is the place at Draper,
where we talked to Houston, Mission Control,
and different people come on different times.
I happen, I don't know how I do this.
I happen to be in the wrong place.
at the wrong time. I was there. I was there when it happened,
meaning when there's drama, I always happened to find myself there,
but it's because I was in the area of error detection and recovery as my main,
that's the part I liked the best, so I concentrated on it.
So you were able to make the fix that you had suggested previously.
Well, I made the fix for the next mission,
but it was the program note that immediately told us what had happened.
happened.
Yeah.
That's fascinating.
Well, just about liking this kind of error prevention and recovery, you know, liking that.
I was wondering if there was, in thinking about your interest in that, I was like, well, what
sort of an interest is that a kind of pursuit of order?
Or, and I wondered if that related to your interest in abstract math.
abstract mathematics or other parts of your life?
I, well, okay.
Yeah, and there is a much even more interesting thing in flight,
but I'll come back to what you just said.
Yes.
I think, I thought about this a lot recently.
I think the what ifs with my father in our philosophy talks
were major, like, what if?
What if?
What if we did this?
He would treat my answers like I was so brilliant.
I would just love to get his attention with coming up with these new ideas.
I mean, he made me think that I was like he'd never thought of it before, but I'm sure he had
many times, but certainly, he would listen to what you had to say and the questioning, and
then he'd come up with questions.
So it was almost like sitting and talking about what to put in the software to avoid a problem
Yeah, so I think that had a lot to do with it.
But also, being in places like Sage or even Lorenz, but being in places where if you made
an error, you didn't forget it.
But Sage was nothing compared to Apollo when it gets into the news that something, I would
always think, I could always see the headlines saying software, whatever, you know.
We were very aware of the fact now that it was man-rated and it had to work.
So that was some, I think, I think to answer your question, I mean, it just made you think about
all the possibilities and what to do about it.
Right.
You were saying there was, you wanted to mention something else that happened in flight.
Apollo 11.
Yes.
Do you want to hear about that?
Sure, absolutely.
Oh, okay.
Well, there's a.
background to this. I think it was around 1966. And I don't know what made me think of
this, but I started worrying about the astronauts and what ifs, you know. And somehow it worried
me what if there's an emergency and they didn't know it. And because they're just merely going
away, reading the data and putting it in, but what if there's something really major
going on?
And it just, that's it.
So I had a meeting with software and hardware people.
By software people at the time, probably I'm meaning systems people, system designers and everything
and the hardware people.
And I wanted to put something in.
Now remember, we have an asynchronous environment, right, with all the software.
However, we were not asynchronously communicating with the astronauts, okay?
We could send something, they'd see the displays, they put something in, but we couldn't interrupt
their displays.
So what I wanted to do was to interrupt the astronauts to tell them there's an emergency so they'd
stop doing what they're doing, okay?
So big meeting and first the hardware guys.
said, can't be done. Remember, I'm still relatively new to this, especially to the hardware.
And I said, well, and also, they all looked at me as a beginner, and I'm not a hardware person.
So what do I know, right? So anyway, so I said, I think, oh, so they said it can't be done.
I said, why not? They said, well, first of all, the hardware's not on throughout all the mission, right?
And I said, so leave it on. Why can't it be left on, right?
And then another hardware guy said, well, I don't know. We've never left it on that long.
It might not work that long, right?
So I said, well, that's too bad. Maybe we could put it on at times where there's most likely to be an emergency.
They said, let us think about this, right? So they came back maybe a couple of days.
And they said, we've decided to leave the hardware on.
I was so happy that, I mean, here these guys are, they're all experts,
they all have their egos like everybody does.
And the fact that they listened to me, and they said, hmm, we really could, because it
was a challenge for them, right?
And they came back and said, we'll do it.
But then the systems guys came along, can't do it.
I said, why not?
And they said, because we've read all the
these things about parallel processing and what you're trying to do has a real problem
because it's no longer async now. It's parallel. You and the asteroid, that's a whole parallelism
thing going on. So I was really upset. I got through the hardware part. Now, that night, I went
home and I had to solve it because it mattered to me that I hadn't come up with something
that what couldn't be solved right as an idea to do.
So I came back with a solution the next day.
And again, these guys were gurus.
I mean, all these guys were gurus.
They've been around in this area for a while.
And they thought about it, and they said, I think it can be done.
And it was something they said had never been done in parallel processing.
But I came up with this rudimentarymentary.
thing if we looked at it now because the problem was he's got his normal display and
now you put up a priority display which one is he answering you see and so I came up
the idea of counting to five before he answers so Houston the hardware guys
got behind it they put the stuff into the hardware and then the Houston guys put it
into their manuals, whatever you call them, checklist for the astronauts.
They practiced, it was called the five-second display.
So it got in all the missions, you know, starting from the landing on the moon.
So it's in there for both the LEM and the Command Module, in case there's an emergency,
whatever it might be.
You warn them, you tell them what it is with this display, and they're given a choice.
You either go here or there, that kind of thing.
So anyway,
Now we go to Apollo 11 and it's time to land, okay?
And so I'm standing in the scammer room again, and they're going through all the things you
go through for landing, and all of a sudden, guess what comes up?
1201 and 1202 priority displays telling them there's an emergency.
This is just before they land.
And here were the things that I had wanted to do was the war in the astronaut when there's
an emergency, and 1201 and 1202 means that there were too many things going on in the computer.
One was to do with the tasks, too many tasks trying to get scheduled, and the other was too
many jobs based on prior to getting scheduled.
So it went to a restart.
and the restart programs were set up to go back to checkpoints, not start the program
over again, but go to the last safe place so that could just pick up and carry on, getting
rid of lower priority stuff.
And just, so that's why it happened more than once.
Now Houston knew, they'd seen the 1201-12 before, and the astronaut knew that he had put the
switch in a position that had caused
extra stuff affecting the computer, and he realized, oh yeah, and he put it back in the right place, and they landed.
So there you have the most exciting one in my mind.
How long of a period of time was that?
Just seconds to spare. I mean, it was just in time.
And what was going through your mind during that?
What must have seemed like an eternity?
Going through my mind had nothing to do with the mission.
It was like, oh my God, my software, the priority displays, that was the part I had personally written.
And it took me back to when the hardware guy said, hey, we'll leave it on.
I mean, I just thought of all of it, but it was the software I was thinking about.
And it was the parallel things working and stunned that it had come up.
I'm not expecting, because the switch was put in a place where it wasn't supposed to be.
And I think the astronaut was used to using it to practice with because it hurried things up,
but he knew right away to put it back.
And Jack Garman, I don't know if you've heard it, Jack Garman, he's the one that made the decision to go,
because he knew right away with the 1201 and 1202 alarms were.
And he and I stayed in touch right up until this year when he died.
And we talked about that often.
But he'll say, in the words, he'd tell me how the astronaut would do this.
So anyway, but he talked about it from his perspective, and I talked about it from mine.
But we reminisced right up.
until this last June about it.
In those reminiscences, what was it like
from his point of view when he saw those?
Oh, he loved talking about it.
And he was so humble.
He would give credit to his boss and his boss's boss.
And he's the one that knew the software.
He was our counterpart there, meaning he trained the astronauts.
He knew what 1201 meant.
He knew.
Oh, and his boss had said, for him,
him because it had happened during simulation at mission control just like days before and even days
before that and his and it spooked them all because it was happening during landing.
As boss said, I want you to write down all the alarms that could come up just in case
this happens.
And so Jack wrote down, we called him Garman, Garman wrote down and so he just, they were
there, but he knew right away what they were.
And he said, go, go, go, and they went.
And as you were standing there in the room in the Draper Laboratory,
did you know, were they asking you for input or were you?
It happened too fast.
It was, yeah.
Yeah.
I remember looking across the room, in the scammer room, at the project manager, one of the guys.
And I remember.
his face just turning white or whatever it turns, blue.
Anyway, because it was totally unexpected.
But I remember the sense of relief when they, when it landed, but it wasn't that long to be nervous.
And was, um, was it, was it when they, you know, successfully landed or when they were
successfully home that you and your colleagues really felt a sense of relief.
Landed.
Oops, pardon me.
Landed.
Yes.
In fact, the Boston Herald on the day of the landing, front page all over the front page, talked about that
and the party we were having at Draper and, you know, so there's all these different collectables
walls, if you will, at that time, talking about it.
Did you just kind of go home when your shift was over, or what, uh, what did you do?
I wouldn't call it a shift.
Or I did, don't know what to call it?
I would just say we were there all the time.
Um, but, you know, we were so into always the next mission.
Um, I don't remember other than worrying about, um, I don't remember other than worrying about
I'm, let's, let's face it, we were always, um, working on the next mission, so this was,
this was an old mission, but then there it is, and it's like, no, you're not supposed to come up now.
This is the wrong time, but yeah, but it was relief.
But I don't remember, um, what we did after that.
When did, when did you begin speaking about, or using the phrase, software engineer?
software engineering.
Oh, yeah, this is an interesting one.
Okay.
You know, when the guys used to throw the stuff over the wall, it was something at Draper,
instrumentation labs, right?
And there's the engineers, hardware engineers, aeronautical engineers, just engineer engineers.
But we were the programmers.
And we were the programmers.
We were kind of like second-class citizens.
I mean, you know, we'd take the stuff and we make it run, right?
And so in doing the simulations, especially when we were simulating everything,
I kept noticing patterns between the different kinds of engineers that were very similar.
Because when we simulated the software or the hardware, we still had decisions to make.
We had things.
going that were interrupts that had to be done.
The commonality in the designs.
It's like, was this software, this design, or was it hardware?
They looked alike in the simulation.
But there also, I noticed there were things that they didn't do,
like the system software stuff.
They didn't worry about who interrupted who.
They worried about their stuff working and getting the right results.
So I can, so when we were say, well, wait a minute, which is this module?
Is that hardware or software?
I said, why don't we call this one the hardware engineering part,
and this is the software engineering part?
It was like I just came up with the term to say,
let's name this part in this whole system definition.
So anyway, the engineers thought it was funny.
There is Margaret again with her software engineering.
You know, it was funny.
But I mean, I didn't take it personally.
We all laughed about it.
So it was a term that had not been heard about at Draper.
Had it been heard about in Russia or somewhere else?
Who knows, right?
But it was a term.
And then there was the joking going on,
say, well, there was Margaret with her software engineering, right?
And one of the hardware gurus stood up in a big,
I remember it saying, you know, Margaret's right.
This is, almost makes me have tears right here.
This is engineering what you people are doing.
Just as much as the stuff we're doing, meaning the hardware.
He said, she's trying to formalize it, and I think it should become formalized.
And everybody respected this hardware guy.
And then later on in 2009, a reunion, Davy Hoag was there.
And he was there.
He, they were giving presentations for the union reunion.
And they'd stand up and reminisce.
And I hadn't really noticed it, but Davey came over to me,
said, Margaret, why are they just talking about hardware stuff?
Where's the software stuff?
He said, they should be getting you up there to talk about software.
And I said, Davy, why don't you tell him that?
And he said, I tried it.
I tried, but they wouldn't listen to me.
I'll never forget that.
Davy got it.
I mean, Davey, everybody looked up to.
But he finally saw the same thing.
And that meant the world to me.
Oh, yeah, this is a field, you know.
So, yeah, that was in 2009.
He was still alive then.
Yeah.
And the, but the term is in,
the term, the notion, the desire is in wide circulation.
Yes.
You know, after this time.
Yes.
Well, some people come up with seeing the term being used
in a program for a conference or, you know,
you've probably read some of this stuff.
But the NASA guys were the ones that said,
Margaret, this never was in anywhere until you started using it.
And
That's what I remember in my case.
And we had not heard of it.
Let me just checking our question list here.
Oh, the theory of errors.
Yeah, I like that.
You named it that.
That was good.
Yeah.
I liked, I was really intrigued.
I was really intrigued.
by just, you know, kind of like a taxonomy of errors
or where they, you know, commonalities and
and also means to kind of attack them,
both automatically and through this eyeballing method.
Could you just talk about that area?
My life story.
My life mission.
Yes.
Okay, so after the man mission,
the man missions, I guess I personally just had a sense of history
about wanting to not just remember things,
but do something based on what lessons were learned.
Just like when an error would happen,
you'd find a way not to let it happen again.
But just in general.
And so, first I had people in my group
get all the anomalies that have been
recorded throughout all the V&V verification validation,
and find out what kind of errors were made
and how would we classify those errors.
And there were some sheets that said reason for error
and it said bug.
That didn't help, right?
But in most cases, we could figure it out one way or the other,
and we began to categorize the errors.
This was funded by, I think, the Air Force.
I got funded.
for this error study we called it.
And so we found out that
73% of the errors were what we called interface problems.
This is during V&V, not on flight.
Nothing was shown up during flight.
And 44% were found by eyeballing,
like Norton or the assembly control supervisors.
And I can't remember the exact percent,
but a very high number percent
percent were still, they could have shown up.
They were still in there, but we didn't,
I don't know how we came up with that category.
They were just plain scary if they happened, right?
So anyway, we took those errors
and came up with this set of axioms,
basically end up being a theory
for systems and software ultimately a theory of control based upon control and
the axioms and there were six axioms having to do at the time with software
because that's what we were going back and looking at ourselves.
And we came up with in trying to define a system using those axioms
because nobody understood the axioms, but we were
we did, right, came up with patterns.
That if you use these, if you use the axioms, but the patterns which could be derived
from them, that there would be, the problems that we had found would not exist.
There would be, for example, no interface problems if we did that.
We took those patterns which were primitives, and we found ways to build more abstract patterns
in terms of the primitives, so we could use it.
could use the primitives plus what was derived from them and that evolved into the language
which would be based on those building blocks we also considered that all systems
inherently were distributed they had asynchronous aspects in other words they all had
had that whether or not it showed up or not with something else okay so and we
also realized we
to define the process of developing a system as a system itself and define that as well
with this language.
We began to notice really interesting patterns that came up by having the language, okay?
Not only were they're not interface errors, but also everything was inherently integrated.
We used the theory eventually for the functional side of a system and the type side of the system.
this grew into more recent times, and they were inherently integrated.
So that, for example, in the automation, if you changed a type,
now we can, like, demote all the things using it.
But it's all formally found, you know, the automation has access.
It can also find parallelisms everywhere they exist.
It can find all the decisions in the definition.
So now, the more we studied and the
the more we saw these kinds of patterns.
And keeping in mind, things like the parents always can control the children, you inherently
can tell the priorities of the system because of the way we define it.
It can automatically find out who's more important now.
But we kept getting these things that we learn from those kinds of definitions.
And so, for example, if you got all the interface errors out,
up front and it's 73 or more percent,
first of all, there's no need for wire tracing
because there were no wire tracing errors left.
Okay.
But at the end of the day, we said,
wait a minute, we don't have to do this kind of test.
We don't have to do this kind of test.
So we minimize the testing to the point where
it's the user's intent.
So if you gave it the wrong thing,
thing you wanted to do, you couldn't do anything about it, although we could even do more about that.
But you know, this is more later.
So then it hit us that all of the languages out there in the traditional environment and the
environments that go with them are concentrating in what we called an after-the-fact life cycle.
You define it, and then you do the implementation, you code stuff, you take out errors, you take out
errors, you find better ways to test for them because you didn't catch it.
After the fact, kind of like back in the old medical community where they didn't wash their
hands, they had the diseases.
after the fact kind of thing.
Or a root canal, if you'd taken care of things,
you wouldn't get to that point.
And that what this was doing, it was a new philosophy
we called before the fact, because just by the way
you define something, it ended up with traceability,
not just within itself in the definition,
the types and the functions and the timing and everything.
But also, by goal,
Going from the definition, we could begin to automatically generate the code because it had the,
it was consistent and logically complete.
So now the code had that behavior, all that behavior.
And now we didn't have to test for things we used to test for.
Did it really do what it intended to do?
That's what we concentrate on.
And so we began to call that development before the fact because a lot of stuff we used to
to do later on was already up front.
So people say, oh, so you're concentrating on reliability.
You must do a lot of testing.
No, the more reliable, in the traditional system,
the more reliable, the more testing, more expensive.
But no, if you define it this way with these kinds of behaviors,
the traceability, going from definition to code,
or within the code, everything.
Even instances of the mechanisms in the definition when it's executing has the same pattern
because they're instances of what we call F maps and T maps.
So all the way through it's got this, it holds on to it.
So we'll say no, in fact, the more you make use of this development before the fact mechanism
that you adhere to it or make use of it,
the more reliable it's going to be.
And that went against conventional wisdom.
But in fact, over and over again, there were different people from DOD,
from academics, government, that would have these,
Lockheed Martin called it shootout,
where we were put up against, you know, what was out there already,
or runoffs.
And in the one, the shootout one, there were 80 organizations involved in analyzing the different people that they were comparing.
And they proved that, or proved as a funny word, but they showed this stuff really did work.
And it, and it did, it had the kinds of properties that, before the fact, development before the fact had,
which was traced back to this kind of behavior.
this kind of behavior in the language.
So, yeah, I still remember being out in Colorado.
And first you had to get in and have your eyes looked at, you know,
because it's the secret environment.
And they had narrowed all the people in the competition down to three vendors.
We were one of them.
And the first, the first went from requirements all the
way down through the DoD life cycle and the everybody got through the requirements.
But then you came through the specs and only two of us got through the specs, but now came
the code, okay?
And we were the only ones who could generate the code, but we had a certain time limit.
So we first generated C, they wanted us to generate Ada, because Ada was the thing.
We first entered C because it's much faster and proved it worked.
Now that we knew it worked, we didn't have to worry about going through the Ada, whatever, it took longer.
At the very end, we were automatically generating the system.
And Ada, and the people that were observing it were saying,
stop it, we believe you, and all this paper was going up.
So that was a memorable experience.
When was that?
Oh, let's see, when was that?
Roughly.
See, I'm thinking.
I'm thinking that because the reports is 19.
I think it was in that time, though.
And MITR was involved.
And each of the vendors had, we had Lockheed Martin working with us where we could prove we could do development together, but they were in Colorado and we were here.
And they had these people from MITR and from, I don't know from which part, DOD.
the OD sitting in watching everything everybody was doing.
And there are six, I think six volumes of this effort.
Yeah.
So that was memorable.
Are there certain trade-offs with this kind of development before the fact,
I'll just call the paradigm, for lack of a better term.
Preventative.
It, this, yeah, preventative rather than restore.
rather than restorative process.
Is there a, is there some sort of cost in terms of changing people's behavior or in performance that...
The cost is training people to do things a new way.
It is a different, it's not a traditional paradigm.
So it's kind of like if somebody comes up with something new, like a new language like they did with,
Java, it takes a big organization, mostly, when you're dealing with technologies, right,
to make that happen.
It's an investment.
But I remember going up to IBM in Toronto, they had 2,000 software people working the traditional
way, but really good at what they did.
And the person who was ahead of that organization, we had a long talk about it.
He said, I'm going to have to change the ways of 2,000 people.
He said, it's a major decision, you know.
It was that kind of trade-off, but the biggest challenge is to do that, just that, is to educate
people, but we used to train people, and we're not in the commercial mode in that way anymore,
but they'd come to our facility, and we would train the people, and it would train the people, and it
would be a five-day course, nine to five.
And so like people from Martin Marriott at the time they were called,
people would come and people would come who weren't even soft for people.
And so they would all think the traditional way and want to show the same thing.
Come Monday, they forgot.
There was like the hump day they everybody used to call it.
But yeah, they were able to, oh, they wrote
about that in that runoff, that shootout.
They wrote exactly about the learning process, everything.
But again, it's a real marketing, it's a real rolling out kind of thing.
And we've stayed with the research end of things.
But yeah, it went, I could go on forever about this part because like Citibank was using
it and big organizations, but they were trying.
trailblazers.
And they wanted to try new things.
And nowadays, it's a different environment.
People, they use tools that are supposed to do this.
They integrate them with this.
It's not compatible, so you've got to buy a new this one.
It's a whole different world.
But it was much more technically oriented.
But this was real-time environments.
Even at Citibank, it was real-time on their transaction processing
environment. But yeah, so many war stories and so many great, you know, results from this.
Well, I did want to talk to you about a few other aspects of your life and career,
which was, I understand that it was in the mid-1970s that you left Draper, the Instrumentation
laboratory, and that you wanted to, and
and that you indeed started a company at that time based on this kind of...
The theory.
This error work.
Yeah, yeah, the error work, I like that.
Could you talk about why you decided to leave at that time and about your first company?
Yes, that was a company where we were doing applications using our theory for a DOD, mostly DOD.
And, yeah, so we, you know, we were in charge, no investors.
But we had, I think it was the Rockefellers, Venrock.
But they wanted to come to us to talk about investing, and so we brought in the,
and they were nice guys, okay.
But then they brought, you know, one thing led to another, many investors,
and now we're getting to be over 100 people.
over 100 people. And, you know, we had sales forces all over the world, but not huge.
We were, you know, not like some of the companies that are huge.
But for what we did, it was all concentrating on, you know, our language, I mean, our theory,
but we hadn't gotten to the point where we had USL. This was earlier stages of the things that we did.
and we were concentrating on software, not systems,
not a whole, not developed before the fact.
But anyway, the investors came in and they felt strongly
that we could make a lot more money if we left the,
it was like what I called the digital world,
because we had several, many customers using our product that was based
based on real-time kind of work, engineering.
So anyway, but they came in and they, oh, I forgot about an important thing.
Yes, okay.
The Ross Perrault's company.
Oh.
EDS?
EDS, yes.
They came up for a meeting.
They had heard about our stuff, and they asked me how much, and they were, and they were
We were impressed with our work, and they asked me what our company would be worth and would I consider selling it.
And I still remember saying, I wouldn't take anything under a billion.
And the thing is, back then, a billion was a lot of money, right?
Well, they thought that was, they knew that I believed in what we were doing and everything,
and we worked with them for over a year back and forth, negotiating and everything.
Well, and we had a deal.
They were going to invest in us, excuse me, they were going to buy us.
And I think it's either 37 or 38 million, which at the time was huge, okay?
So a deal was made at a board meeting, handshakes.
All of a sudden, EDS was being wined and dined by General Motors, who was being being
buying them out and said they had to stop all acquisition efforts.
And I was dealing with Mort Myersson, who was the CEO under Ross Parole.
And somebody actually asked him if he remembered that amount.
And he said, no, it wasn't $37 million, it was $38.
But anyway, so at this time, we had many investors, and they thought this was going to take off, right,
for them and I mean that this deal was going to go through and we'd support them
and work with them and everything.
But all of a sudden the deal was broken and so they had to blame somebody.
So, you know, maybe it's the marketing guy's fault, right?
But ultimately, it fell on me because I'm the one that negotiated that work with them.
And if I had done it faster,
faster this wouldn't have happened to us.
So anyway, it's probably true.
But in these days, a handshake would have legally meant something.
Back then, apparently it didn't.
In hindsight, I'm looking back on it.
So anyway, they then brought in new management,
and I became chairman of the board.
I was anyway, but I was
I guess they call that being kicked upstairs.
Well, I was CEO, but then they brought in a new CEO.
So everybody there decided that the important thing was to go commercial, meaning IBM.
Our product was not on the mainframe, on IBM.
It was on the VACS.
And by going in that direction, we were basically going to, our customers,
we were leaving behind.
And that was often running, really.
really, seriously, often running.
But there was, yes, IBM had loads of machines,
and you could make money and everything,
but it wasn't the path that we were on.
We were like a sailboat, and they were like a big ship, right?
So anyway, they even came up with an idea for a product
that was doing some of what we did in our product,
but it was simplifying it.
And by the way, they could just market it and sell it,
but the technical people weren't going to be.
The people who were developing were being left behind, basically.
So I decided it was time, it was time to go home.
And in the words, to leave that company and think about taking our technology and evolving it further.
And so that's what happened.
I think we departed ways in a friendly, as friendly as one can.
And I decided I would just go to this part of Italy and become a waitress and forget about this entire world.
But then some people came to see me that were friends of mine from DOD, and they said, Margaret, you're not going to go over there.
You're going to keep going through work, and we're going to give you some funding.
And so we were off and running again.
And going from the technology, which was concentrating on the functional side, the doing side.
the time space, the, to including all of the above, okay.
And so we then began to work on expanding it to include everything that one could think of in a system
and came up with USL.
And then we came up with double one, which is its automation.
And that was maybe 30 years ago.
So, but we're research people now.
We have concentrated on that.
On pushing?
Not the commercial part.
We've turned over certain work to people who have been customers,
but we're concentrating on just getting it recorded, getting it out there,
and putting things in it that carry out our most recent ways of making it even more streamlined in USL.
What happened to?
that first company?
Well, okay, I left, I'm trying to think of when I left.
But it was at least two years later, maybe three years later, that they folded.
Oh.
And, yeah, but I didn't know, I wasn't, I mean, I wasn't involved.
I was, it was just like two different companies.
They went in a totally different direction.
They had.
only the IBM product and we were still selling and dealing with customers who were
in the Vax environment and then the Linux environment. So we stayed true to our beginnings.
And in your present firm, Hamilton Technologies, with that research, as a research company,
if you will, has that been through getting mostly research contracts from the government or has it also been from industry?
Yes. Even academics. But, yeah, I mean, when we were still concentrating and selling the product, it's all of the above, but probably more government.
But also like Citibank was a customer. Scott Paper was a customer.
But they're again, they're the real-time world, the engineering side of the world that were mostly involved.
Right.
But yes, if somebody were commercially oriented, yeah, I think they could do some very interesting things with it as a commercial endeavor.
Deborah.
Well, just being mindful of the time.
Yes.
I thought perhaps, it's four o'clock.
I thought perhaps I could switch to the set of more general reflective questions at the end of the
question list.
Yes.
If you feel that we've hit the, that we've done a good enough job.
good enough job.
Well, the question is, do you feel like?
Of covering the career.
I think, I would like to ask some of these general reflective questions.
So maybe we'll, if it's okay with you, we can just turn to them.
Okay.
One, which is a question which would personally frighten me to try and answer, is just about proudest moment of your life or one of the proud moments of your life.
I don't think I'm comfortable with a
word proud.
But the most memorable, the most exciting, the thing I think back to probably more often
is that whole experience with Apollo 11 and then doing and finding a way to work within a distributed
environment coming out of a synchronous to an asynchronous multi-programming and the fact it was
a distributed, in other words, it's the discovery.
and the breakthroughs that are the most exciting to me.
Yeah, that's, I just can't forget them.
And this, I think, is another kind of interesting question.
The real turning points in your life that led you to the career that you've had.
And maybe these inflection points where
your life really may have gone in a different direction if you have reflections on that.
I think, yeah, I think probably when I think back, probably turning points where, you know,
having to struggle to make a living in my own family where because I had to go out and work and do things,
and I had to kind of be thrown into situations, even moving many times,
where I had to deal with unknowns all the time.
Unknown people, you know, learning how to be around people from different places,
being around unusual father, unusual grandfather, Florence Long,
but just the influences I had along the way.
along the way, Professor Lorenz, definitely,
I think back to him now more than I ever did before,
because I realize how much he taught me
without trying to, but just his influence,
and how even just looking at understanding something because of the coffee,
how he looked outside of his world
and came up with new things, right?
Right.
So that was a turning point, but also the fact that I had to go out and make a living,
which got me into things I wouldn't have gotten into.
If I weren't out there working to try to get money for graduate school or support the family,
I maybe would never have gotten involved in the things that I got into.
But the variety of jobs, the variety of things, the variety of places, I mean,
variety is, as they say, the spice of life, but certainly that was part of it.
So turning points, how do you go back and make one turning point?
It was a collection or an integration of things, right?
In some ways, we just answered the next question on this list
was like role models and people who you really admired and looked up to.
It seems like you...
Like I included that in there, right?
Yeah.
My father, my grandfather, my grandmother, who was a journalist, and Florence Long, the mathematician,
Professor Lorenz.
I mean, it's really important.
People in your life can really influence what you do, which is kind of something.
which kind of scares me because I hope I influenced my family in the right way.
But it is amazing.
Yes, absolutely.
And actually, the younger you are, probably has more influence
as they seem to think that this is the case.
So, yes, going back to the family years and being around at times like the war,
when the war was over, and the impressions that it makes,
and the books that you read.
You know, Dick and Jane.
Jane, right? All the way from Dick and Jane to a thousand years of solitude.
The next question is about any life lessons or advice that you'd like to impart to young people.
And maybe young people even considering a career in doing something technical?
Yeah.
But, you know, I have always found when I've hired people,
the combination of the experts and the young kids works best
because sometimes the experts can get stuck in a traditional way
and the young kids might come out and say,
why this, right?
And I think I've learned along the way from the young kids.
But keeping in mind there's old people that are still young kids at heart.
kids at heart. Okay, they have an open mind. But I guess,
don't be afraid to question things and don't be afraid to ask so-called stupid questions.
I mean, I remember, this is a little off from your question point of view, but thinking
in different ways, you know, like the sour milk or something like that.
like that but at Earlham believe it or not in order to graduate you had to do a
somersault in phys ed and I could not do a somersault and I could not do a somersault and I
thought I'm not going to graduate I haven't passed this right and so for years I'd
not been able to I was just afraid of this thing and all of a sudden and I was taking
ballet swimming and all that and it hit me I can do a somersault I'll do it in the
water. So I passed that physical ed exam.
Well, it's learning to think of solving the problem.
If you can't solve it, put it in a different place.
You know, so, and don't be afraid to disagree with the experts.
If, you know, in our company, I'd always say, never say never.
And never give up. Just because people say it's never going to work.
You know, that doesn't mean you have to give up.
And there have been many times when people say things like that and you ignore them.
It was a good thing.
Yeah.
Um.
And this is a, I would love, if you have any thoughts about what the future may hold for software or maybe for computing more broadly.
This is a question that I thought of actually last night.
The future for software. Well, first of all, I guess the before the fact paradigm,
has a big chance, I think, in the future of taking off not because it's an elegant way of doing things perhaps in some people's minds.
Not even because it costs less to develop it because you don't have to do as much work along the way.
Well, maybe because of that, because it would save a lot of money if you did it.
if you did it that way.
But it might cost a lot to get people educated and turned around.
But if you're dealing with a paradigm or a language and an environment,
which can handle any kind of system,
then maybe some of the problems in AI that could be there
because you're using earlier paradigms might speed up more.
Because, well, some things are just playing too much.
things are just plain too expensive to do.
And if you can save a lot of resources to do it a more modern way,
then you might solve problems you wouldn't have solved before because it was too expensive to try to solve it,
like going to Mars or whatever.
So I think there may be more consideration of doing things in a more modern way and not just keep doing things
because that's the way everybody is doing it.
Like, you don't have to do a somersault the way people think somersault, right?
But, yeah, thinking, as they say, outside the box, or some people never in the box.
But yes, I think what I'm talking about is the science of software.
What's a good term for what I'm trying to say?
The mathematics of systems in software.
and how it affects automation and the way we build systems and whether we're even able to do it
from a breakthrough point of view or from a cost point of view.
But I see it heading in that direction.
If I have anything to do with it.
Well, Margaret, maybe we could talk a bit about just after Apollo and the development of your work,
error studies and also how that work related.
to your efforts with both Skylab and the space shuttle.
The Space Shuttle.
Okay, so I think the Air Force,
well, NASA continued our funding because of Skylab
and the Space Shuttle, and Skylab was very much a continuation,
the work on the onboard flight software for the Moon missions.
On the space shuttle, we were asked to give requirements, so we spent a long time making recommendations for the space shuttle.
For example, how important it was because we'd gone from a synchronous environment to an asynchronous environment to build our onboard flight software.
Asynchronous software was much safer, we thought, than the synchronous software.
So that was a recommendation.
as an example. But during this time, the Navy got wind of the axioms, the six axioms,
which was this formal mathematics for software.
Okay, and so the Navy called and asked for me,
and I had some people in my group that were in my office at the time,
and they want to speak to me, and they said,
how would you like to build a specification language based upon your axioms?
axioms. And I said, I would love that. I would love that. So I got off the phone
and I said to everybody, you know what? I don't know. What do they mean by specification language?
I said, I better call them back and tell them. I don't know what they mean.
So I called them right back and I said, what do you mean by specification language?
And they said, we don't know. We were hoping you would know. So we got the funding for the
the specification language based on that early axiomatic theory.
And then the Army called up and said, how would you like to define the development process as a
system and build an automation based on that?
So then we started working with the Army. And in the meantime, NASA is involved throughout
much of this.
So we had many, oh, yes. And then Draper was very intrigued by the axioms.
And so the IR&D people would come up, I think, once every four years, to decide which research was the most valuable for industry.
So they came up from the different agencies.
Okay, Army, Navy, Air Force, eventually people became the Star Wars people.
And so Draper selected, I think it was six research types from Draper.
And what we've been working on, and I was on the axioms.
And then there were others there, and they had questions that we had to answer in our presentation.
And I'll remember that one of the questions was
was, does this apply, does your work apply to DOD?
And everybody would say how it applied and everything.
And I remember creating this huge, this slide
with huge colored yes going across the slide.
And that seemed to win them over a little bit,
my enthusiasm.
And then I was going through the axioms.
explaining what it meant, and I remember Cliff McLean,
who was very good friends with the president, Duffy, at the time.
And one of the things that's in there is because of the axioms,
if you produce an output, somebody's got to take it in as an input.
It can't just be hanging out there.
And if you have an input, somebody has to pick it up and do something with it.
And Cliff said, yeah, we have a few people like that that could do something about that.
So anyway, we all got graded like, you know, I don't remember fours, like grades, like grading school in college, right?
Whether it's three point, whatever.
And this was for 6.1 research kind of efforts.
And so I got totally across the board all, it was four is the best, all fours.
And they were all excited about it.
And then that's when Cliff said he wanted me to come down to, I think he was ahead of civil defense at the time.
Or, you know, what became eventually not civil defense, but to do with Star Wars, the pre-Star Wars effort.
So he said, I'd like you to come down and have a fireside chat with me about your axioms.
I thought, oh, okay, I'll go down and talk with him.
There'll be a fireplace and that'll be very interesting.
And that'll be very interesting.
I go down there and there's this huge table with all these experts for this fireside chat.
And then we got our funding, I think it was funding for civil defense, where we were to define
civil defense itself as a system, not software system, but civil defense itself as a system.
But civil defense itself as a system.
So we did that.
with the language in its earlier stage.
And we got a call from the CIA saying,
how did you know this, right?
By defining civil defense as a system,
it showed inputs, outputs, and it led them over to other places
where they got data or information.
And they were places we shouldn't even have known about,
but by actually interviewing people and questioning them.
we would learn where it came from.
So we didn't know about like the CIA,
but we discovered it was coming from somewhere,
and then people could, in the words,
so by actually formally defining a system,
you learn more about it than the people who even built it
and that kind of thing happened even in a manufacturing place
down in Alabama
where we found out, I mean, they found out,
that when they found out that when
they talked about making changes.
They didn't consider things like decisions in all their decisions.
So they found out much more about where the work was being done, where they were wasting,
and it was defining the shop floor all the way up to the management as a system.
It could have run as a piece of software, if you know what I'm saying.
So it was, we began to use it then for systems, not just software.
And listening to you talk about that, I am reminded a bit of cybernetics.
And that, not to say the exact same approach, but the interest of looking,
it's kind of a science of systems, you know, of interactions, you know, I guess decisions, you know, I guess decisions as a form of feedback.
you know, what?
Which all systems do inherently, even though it's not explicitly shown, right?
Right.
If you think about it.
Is there, was that a connection that you and your colleagues drew to that earlier whole literature about cybernetics?
Meaning, when did it begin?
Oh, that, I'm, that would have preceded your work, you know, in the, you know, in the, you know, in the, you
in the 40s and 50s, I guess.
Right.
No, we didn't really, there was, is it pretty, not pretty, I'm trying to think of the name of something
that it reminded us, our customers, researchers of, I'm trying to,
it's a mathematics, but it didn't have all of the real time in it.
In other words, the mathematics that the mathematics that we have,
we had come up with has the control aspect in it, which considers access rights and things
like that, and the priority of prioritization of things which considered importance.
So it was a different dimension onto any mathematics that was around was the control part,
so access rights, for example, most important is controlling.
who's allowed to invoke who.
You could only have one parent.
None of this had we or people found, but there's a mathematics I'm trying to think a name of,
which did some of it, the functional side part of it, but it didn't tie together the entire
things like parallelism.
Right.
And I'm trying to think of some other.
trying to think of some other aspects that we learned along the way, and there were no rules as to where you could go get stuff from.
I'm thinking of the axioms now as I'm going through it.
It's like, oh, or detecting an error when it's running in real time.
The axiom, you look at something and it won't let you go any further.
Anything that the automation could now do and take off with, in the words, if you could do
In the words, if you could automatically go from the definition and actually run it in the real world,
anything that would make that be able to happen inherently or automatically
is where the aspects of control helps solve that problem.
I guess one last, my last question for you, if that's okay, would be driving here today,
today, I was listening to a podcast, and the subject was about essentially diversity
issues of all kind in the tech industry today.
And this was focused on the Silicon Valley context, but it was both for people.
The discussion was about both people of color and women.
How did I know?
Well, I'm sorry.
It just occurred to me.
Yeah.
I, you know, I hesitate to ask and feel, we can skip it if you'd like, but, you know, I just wondered if you had any reflections on that sort of, you know, the gendered, the continuing, what appears to be a struggle for gender equity, gender diversity in, particularly in software, but in technical fields more generally.
Right.
The reason I said, how did I know?
Because I am asked that more often in these days than in earlier days.
But maybe it was more, in the earlier days, everything was right out in front as to how people felt about, you know, the whole madman kind of thing, for example, era.
But I've been amazed, I gave a talk at my college at Erlem, where they want to know what is it like being.
in engineering field and being a woman.
So I talked about that for one of their special colloquiums or whatever it was.
And I was amazed that afterwards people come and they want to talk about it.
But there were professors all over the place who basically said it was a problem.
And I was surprised that it almost seemed to be worse in some ways today.
in some ways today than it was back in the early days because then you were sort of like just an exception.
Because you just sort of, you know, you were doing a good job so they decided to give you more.
But I mean, there didn't seem to be that much of a distinction.
But now I do remember on hindsight, it's made me think more about what it was like back.
what it was like back then.
And women were paid less.
And I remember several things back then.
I found out that some men were making twice as much as women
for no reason.
But excuses were given out like, well, because women get married,
their husband will support them so they don't need it.
I mean, these were actual reasons.
that were given.
And then I remember having somebody that worked for me
trying to take a loan out from the credit union.
And they said she needed her husband's signature.
This is when I was at MIT.
And I said, well, would a guy need his wife's signature?
No.
So I went to the credit union at MIT.
And I told him, this is not fair.
this is not fair and the credit union was made up of mostly men but some women.
And the men all agreed with me that the rules should be changed.
And a couple of women said,
I know I think my husband should approve this.
And I said, well, you can go ahead and have your husband approve it,
but I'm not going to make it for every other woman.
That's not right.
So anyway, they changed the rules.
And so I don't remember which question.
question you asked me in this way, but I do know that I think it's tougher now in some ways
because of things like the internet, where bullying is easier and it's hidden.
I mean, if things were happening back in the old days, you could kid back.
You knew who they were.
Now you can go into things like, you know, they'll write about somebody on Wikipedia,
and you'll go back to novelists.
And they went from being one of the best novelists to being one of the best women novelist.
And you don't know who's changing it because, but I'm saying,
I think there's a whole new set of problems.
And bullying can happen when you don't know who's doing the bullying online.
I'm not an online person myself.
I don't join any of this stuff.
But it's a new world.
And so how do you fight it?
We have to understand it.
It's like any enemy, right?
You have to understand your enemy.
And I think people are getting by with things that are probably making me,
this is just my humble approach.
my humble opinion that may be making things more difficult for minorities and women.
And so you have to hit it from like when I had to fight that.
I did several things like that on hindsight because it wasn't fair.
I didn't think of it as men and women.
It wasn't fair.
But I think about it in our culture, and I think it's a really cultural problem.
When you see women not.
women not being allowed to drive in certain countries or you see women can't become priests
and you start seeing it and you know how I feel about system of systems of
systems and the butterfly effect or whatever every single one of those things
impacts our culture or impacts women or minorities as to whether they can even do
something or not because kids might think
well, I can't do that because I'm this or I'm that.
Until we start making changes, until our leaders stop admiring people
who do things that encourage that, we have a problem.
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And so, yes, I think it's a cultural thing,
and the only thing we can do as individuals is take one at a time
and take somebody under your wing, try to help them do the work.
So in my way.
case, for example, I said, can you help me? In one case, if somebody's working for you,
you should be able to make at least much as people that work for you, that kind of thing.
And then you get somebody who is open-minded, not open-minded, who gets it.
And you get them to work for you sometimes because you know they can do it better
because they're not the minority.
So you work at it from bottom up and from the top.
from the top.
Well, great.
Well, thank you.