I'm dying to know how you did WFH in the 1960s though? That's well before the pc/modem generation ?? I'm tempted to say it was probably still the punch card era ... Did they punch the code onto cards at home, and mail the stacks to the client ?
As I recall they had a machine that took the “scantron” cards and spit out punched ones.
And I don’t remember if they had it or I just read about it later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save your bacon.
i've only ever seen it for multiple-choice questions
The bureaux was a third party, I think their clients didn't have a computer either but I don't know.
I can barely comprehend a build-test-compile cycle that involved standing in line to use a machine. Sending them through the postal service is mind boggling. I don’t think anywhere near this many neurodivergent people could have worked in IT back then. It would have been too much.
Back then you'd program in punch cards, so if you have the punch-card equipment you could do this near anywhere. So there wasn't a big difference between being at home or the office. It also allowed managers to hire low-wage women easier.
It wasn't later that IT became a more profitable and less niche field that these women were pushed out and replaced with men. Programming stopped being 'pink collar' due to this dynamic.
As far as modems go, we didnt really see that get big until the 1980s with speeds like 1200-2400 baud being groundbreakingly fast compared to 300 baud. You could receive or send text almost as fast as you could read it or type it, so it was not that different than using a green screen terminal at work or at university.
Later, more 'always on' was possible. In the US, the phone system was setup in a way that local calls, defined by geographic rings based on switching stations, were 0 cents a minute after the initial first minute. So that allowed things like BBS culture to thrive.
So you would need to write out your program manually. You'd need to explain in clear english what you were doing and why. Then you'd transcribe into machine language (or an intermediary if you were using something fancy like assembly) you can see part of the process here: http://ict1301.co.uk/13010310.htm
Then you'd put them onto card or tape, but that might be done by someone else. Typist were a specialised and often exclusively feminine profession, often seen as something not done by "programmers".
byt the mid 60s though, it was much more common to have programmers type their own shit.
Then once thats done, you'd deliver the media (card desk or paper tape, later on other things) to the operator, who would run the programme and return the results. You'd stack your programmes in queues. (hence where we get that name from)
It was definitely suffering, and I found that thesis interesting, but I don’t think I ever agreed with it. It was a mismanagement problem not a workflow one.
You couldn’t redraw the “screen”, just reprint the command line every time you hit backspace. Which is also why CTRL-U and CTRL-W are commands that date back to teletype machines. Much quicker and cheaper to drop the entire input or a word and try again.
SO + Wikipedia seem to think it was the ASR-33, which was originally 1963. I had this notion that it was about 5 years before that. But it's clear the ASR-32 does not have a CTRL or a SHIFT key, and I'm not sure who they could have possibly stolen the idea from.
Reading a little more reminded me of another fact: the ASR33 was the first commercial use of the ASCII character format, which was developed in parallel.
Hundreds of women familiar with assembly programming couldn't have appeared of thin air to go mentally execute their code and punch it into cards.
I guess it was a possibility, but then it's a prime example of capitalism fixing/exploiting the pay gap.
A company specifically created to hire those women was a brilliant idea.
however, shirley did not found her company 'freelance programmers' in 01975
she founded it in 01959
the ensuing 20 years were among the most successful years in history for feminism in the usa and uk, marked by, among other things, rapidly growing female participation in the labor force
Most people were poor, and married, and with children, so that would make sense if the real issue was underrepresentation in some upper class jobs.
also, if you had a baby, usually you got fired because you couldn't come to work for months or even years (unless you could afford a nanny), and then you had to start your career again from the beginning at a new job
underrepresentation in upper-class jobs was a real issue, but far from the only one
It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
The main difference is the time between feedback on your code. Back then, you'd only know if there was an error in your code when it failed to run. Now we get it almost instantaneously. But that's not how it always was.
Assembly programmers would then turn the graphs into assembly using the best technique at the time, at moments having to use NOPs to cool down the ram.
For these people the source of truth was the graphs and the actual assembly was throwaway.
Can you explain how, exactly, one compares the ease of assembly to the ease of formal logic, such that one can then make a definitive and sweeping statement about that comparison?
At the risk of an analogy, I would describe assembly programming as memory-intensive, and math as compute-intensive.