At the end of the 1980s, I was in a systems administration class for a now gone minicomputer line. There were two women in it who seemed quite mature, but must

At the end of the 1980s, I was in a systems administration class for a now gone minicomputer line. There were two women in it who seemed quite mature, but must have been younger than I am now. One told a story about her introduction to computing that has stuck with me. She passed an aptitude test to become a programmer: by now I have forgotten whether she worked for a computer manufacturer or a customer the size of a utility company. Whichever it was, the company had a machine room with a glass window opening onto a busy street in Manhattan. In those days, programs mostly resided on punch cards, and data mostly resided on tapes. One would bring one's cards and I suppose tapes to the operators. They would hang the tapes, run the cards through the reader, and the tapes would commence to spin back and forth. If all went well, the program ended with the tapes spinning on back to the reel. In case of an ABEND, everything stopped, and every New Yorker on the sidewalk could say that the program didn't work. It struck me as being far more public a test than most of us my age and younger have ever had to deal with.