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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had talked to my grandmother more before she developed dementia. I knew she was a mathematician and programmer, but briefly speaking to her a few years back, she mentioned that one of her jobs was calculating orbits for satellites in the Soviet Union.

At least, I hope they were satellites!

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I'm in a similar boat. My mother worked with software simulations for the AEGIS system. Not very common work for black women in the 1980s. She earned her mathematics degree in 3 years, graduating at 20, and used to program computers with punch cards in the 70s.

Now she can't tie her shoes consistently.

To everyone reading, capture the stories of your loved ones life accomplishments before it's too late!

This. Not related to the main story here - I'm the first programmer in my family - but my great-grandfather was born in 1865 and lived a long life, he was blind for his last 30 or 40 years but had a phenomenal memory. A neighbor had the insight to use one of the very first tape recorders, just after WW2, together with my father who was a boy at that time, to record my great-grandfather's stories about what he did in life. When my father retired he cobbled together a working tape recorder from two or three old ones, and copied the stories over to cassette, and later to CD. I listened to one of those recordings the other day - my great-grandfather told about how when he as a young boy, approximately around 1872-1873, he met a very old man who told about how he had learned the origin of the name of where they (he and my great-grandfather) lived, from another man when he was a boy. That origin turned out to be very different from what everyone these days are guessing, but immensely more plausible. Brought to me from the 18th century, via my great-grandfather.

I would highly encourage anyone who has even thought about doing this; do it. If you are thinking about how to get started, I recommend the StoryCorp app. It is easy to use they have a bunch of prebuilt questions or you can create your own. You record directly to your phone but if you are inclined, you can upload your interview to the Library of Congress. https://storycorps.org/participate/storycorps-app/

There is also a project dedicated to saving the wisdom of earlier generations: https://savewisdom.org/the-1000-word-save-wisdom-questions/

I actually interviewed my mom about ... 15 years ago? About some topics. But the fucking recordings are locked up in a proprietary recorder that requires software running on windows95 to unlock it, and I don't even know if the software exists anymore.

I should make that my December project, to find a way to unlock those files.

Check if they aren't just xor'ed, I've seen that being used before as cheap "encryption".

> At least, I hope they were satellites!

Could be both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment...

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