Amy Fowler's Blog

the smartest person in the room

A little more than 50 years ago, a team of brilliant engineers and mathematicians set out in the confines of an old battery factory in Philadelphia to build the world's first supercomputer, the UNIVAC LARC. My mother (Mary Cush, at the time) was on that team. So this year, as I sat in my seat at JavaOne, glancing at the sea of predominantly male geeks around me, I thought about how I came to be a software engineer and I realized that I pretty much owe that to her.

After my mother graduated college with a Math degree in 1955, she considered her options; become a teacher or get married. With no desirable marriage prospects at that time (we'll get to that later), she did what any smart, resourceful individual would do. She sent out a bunch of letters to corporations and was ultimately hired by Remington-Rand (formerly Eckert-Mauchly) to be a Logical Designer. There she worked on a small team writing machine code to drive the LARC computer, which is pretty incredible if you realize that topping the list of important single career women characters of the 50's is Kitty of Gunsmoke. A few years later a team of Livermore Lawrence Laboratory engineers came out to Remington-Rand (then renamed Sperry Corp) to learn about maintaining the LARC and my Mom met James Moore (my Dad), they got married, moved to California, and started a family. She then did what every respectable woman of 1960 did; she left her career behind to dedicate her life to raising her four daughters.

So I grew up with stories of rooms filled with transistors with gold-plated connections, counting by 1's and 0's, and a general love for math and logic. But most importantly I grew up in a household where the smartest person in the room was always my mother (my Dad is brilliant too, but that's a different story) and it never, ever occurred to me that there was anything boys could do that girls couldn't, except perhaps tackle football, which really only highlights an exceptional series of synapses in the woman's brain. Thanks to her, I emerged from the carnage of teenage-girlhood with an unshakable pride in being smart. Thanks to her, I've steered my way through a software career dominated by men without losing my sense of being a girl. Thanks to her, I've kept my pinky hooked into a job I love while raising my own children (yes, Sun has helped there too).

So Mom, this year for Mother's Day I'm skipping cards and flowers and giving you this blog instead. You've made such a difference in my life. You're still the smartest person in the room.

For fun I'm including an excerpt from the Univac LARC Programming Manual, which shows just how far (and not far) we've come in 50 years:

"The Larc computer is an extremely high-speed computing device. Its high speed is obtained in part by using overlapping instructions, that is, the computer does not wait until and instruction has been executed before extracting the next from storage. Consequently, instructions follow each other rather closely through the stages of the control unit. In fact, as many as four instructions may be in the control unit at any one time.

This overlapping of instructions of course increases the complexity of the computer and imposes certain sequencing restrictions on the programmer. In some cases by careless use of instructions a programmer may increase the running time of his program. In rare instances errors can be caused by failing to observe the restrictions. "

Comments

• Hats off to your mom, Amy! Thanks for sharing that story. I'll show it to my daughter (17) - and my son (14). - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on May 12, 2007 at 03:11 PM

• Wonderful post!

  I have 3 daughters and I do get worried when I see that our industry is mostly male dominated, so I try to encourage learning math and science in the house. It's funny, on the way back to JavaOne I was thinking about that and got the girls a magnet set which they love. I also was very interested in "Project Greenfoot" and plan to use it to teach my daughters a bit about programming (at a very high level, they're all still very young) and maybe use it for teaching programming principles at local schools.
  
  I'd be interested to hear why you think the industry is still very much male dominated, and what can be done, given your experience and that of your mom to change that.

  Happy mother's day!

  Augusto

  Posted by: augusto on May 12, 2007 at 10:54 PM

• Hi Augusto - re: Why male dominated -- Good question... There is certainly some cultural aspect: when I got my MS & MSc in venezuela (USB) the ratio was about 50/50. - eduard/o

  Posted by: pelegri on May 13, 2007 at 06:24 AM

• Hi Augusto,
  Sadly, the percentage of females entering the technology field has been on a steady decline (40% in 1986, 29% in 1999, and still dropping) according to the paper, Where are the Women in Information Technology? published by the Anita Borg Institute. The paper offers many interesting theories, most of which would be tough to summarize here.

  I do have many funny (and some not so funny) anecdotel stories over the years that illustrate the gender dynamic in our industry. Here's one of my favorites:
  I was having lunch out with my team (who all happen to be men) and one of them brought along a visiting colleague. The conversation somehow turned to women engineers and this fellow stated, with all seriousness, "It's important to have a female engineer on the team because you need someone with color-sense to choose the colors for the GUI." Fortunately for this guy, my team was able to restrain me from chucking my Hobee's energy blend directly into his face. And I can tell you that no one on my team comes to me for color advice. :-)
  

  Posted by: aim on May 13, 2007 at 10:30 PM

• That's true about not asking for color advice, but all of us came to Amy for help with tough design and implementation issues. My hunch is Amy was the smartest person in the Swing team's room, and her ability to balance work and family so well proves it!

  Posted by: tball on May 14, 2007 at 11:19 AM

• Nice post.

  Posted by: zarar on May 14, 2007 at 12:41 PM

• excellent post and eloquent mother's day "card" :)

  i hope my eager and energetic 1.5 yr girl "finds her way" through life and i aim to do my steady best to help her get a running start and be there when needed. in that regard, this entry was encouraging :)

  - james
  

  Posted by: gonzo on May 14, 2007 at 06:26 PM

• Great post, Amy, and thanks for the pointer to "Where Are the Women in IT." In my family of four siblings, two of us (a brother and sister) got the math and science genes, and two others (both sisters) did not. It's always puzzled me that the one pair could enjoy their fields so much, whereas my other sister and I happily left the formal study of math and science behind at the end of our high school years. We all have the same roots, the same upbringing, and yet quite different takes on what brings us pleasure and challenge in our lives.

  Posted by: coreador on May 15, 2007 at 09:32 AM

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