It's funny how current these photos seem when they're colored like contemporary photos.
1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#521969 and 1970. That was the time Bell Labs withdrew from MULTICS project and a couple of developers who found themselves without a job starter working internally on a little word processor suite called UNIX.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#53What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.
Well into the 90s one of my aunts was a programmer on the 5ESS switch code, mission-critical stuff that needed to be 99.9995% reliable. She was eventually laid off when Lucent abandoned the line and she transitioned into a far more lucrative career as a realtor. I know other ladies of my mother's generation (I was born in 1970) who worked at IBM and the like. If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS cours…
If you look at female percentage of enrollment in CS
courses, you will find it actually declined since
the 70s
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#54What happened to all the women? This office would make diversity/inclusion officers salivate.
For one thing I guess in these times the keyboard was still something associated with a female role.
Then what perhaps also contributed is the roles of workers by collar color. Coding was perhaps more considered manual labor (blue collar). Yet people seem to forget it's actually the computers doing the manual labor. The developer is much more a complex designer role thinking up the execution architecture.
So we got the waterfall movement where it was believed the higher payed intellectual roles didn't need to know how to code. I think this caused many men and women shifting towards those roles. We got the feminist movement which was very much focused on getting women into those higher payed top jobs. Coding wasn't considered one of those.
Then perhaps the education system is partly to blame. It has become a commercial enterprise making sexy promises for a future life. In earlier times it was more common to start at the bottom and work/promote your way up the career ladder. You would move up because you were more valuable doing other things. Other people could take over parts of your job. In our current time the idea is that you can just get some university degree, skip all the lower jobs and stream in sideways. This leaves the "upper jobs" somewhat disconnected from the "lower jobs". It perhaps causes some dysfunctional organizations. Especially in Europe.
I think this is what "the establishment" dictates. Meanwhile there were still those creative people getting their hands dirty hacking up cool solutions in their basements, garages and attics. Much more driven by a certain attitude than the safety and promises of a certain education. Their products simply outperformed the ones coming from the establishment.
We get the weird situation we see today.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#55All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...
There may be a little bit of a selection bias going on - as you described - but it is worth remembering that back in the 50s and possibly 60s system administrators did used to be quite a female dominated role because they used to manage the cypher machines during the second world war while the men went off to fight and thus that trend of seeing women in server rooms continued a little while after.
Sadly the designing and building those machines were still male dominated - the female role was more administrative than what we now think of as a "sysadmin".
As for what caused the shift to become so male dominated. I couldn't say for sure. I have a few theories but I wont share them as they're largely speculative.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#56All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig w…
when people talk about "women in tech" they usually don't mean secretaries but women doing mathematics, engineering and programming.
PS: The best secretary I ever had was male; some of the smartest CS-folks I know are women.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig w…
when people talk about "women in tech" they usually don't mean secretaries but women doing mathematics, engineering and programming. PS: The best secretary I ever had was male; some of the smartest CS-folks I know are women.
That you've had a secretary either puts you at an age where you have no idea what the labour market has been like in the last 20 years or at an income level where you have no idea what the majority of tech work has been like in the last 20 years.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#58All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig w…
> I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary
The problem is the "improvement" is a financial one for the company rather than a workflow improvement at the employee level.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#59All these comments on the number of women in the photographs and "what happened to all the women in tech?" ... I'm just thinking the photographer was a man with a plan. Anyway heres Wonderwall https://web.archive.org/web/20190202185041/http://www.larryl...
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig w…
UK, non-government public sector, very senior people still have secretaries - often described as personal assistants. The PAs handle interfacing and information flow, the senior people can get on with the thinking.
Re: 1969 and 1970 at Bell Labs
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened to the women in tech is that the clerical jobs were all replaced by computers. I'm still not clear how office work has improved by me not having a secretary. The two hours a day I waste on email, meeting planning etc would pay someone a comfortable wage and mean I don't have to be bothered all the time by emails that I probably don't need to answer, unless it's from those two people. In my current gig w…
UK, non-government public sector, very senior people still have secretaries - often described as personal assistants. The PAs handle interfacing and information flow, the senior people can get on with the thinking .
A PA is not a secretary years ago I worked on organising a large event and one of the committee member was the PA to the county fire chief.
She was awesome, at the first meeting she had worked out from previous years all the key things the other members of the committee needed to do - written all the letters and handed them to us to sign.