5 ms·

I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like the write

I've been watching a TV called "Halt and Catch Fire", about the early PC industry in the 1980's. I've enjoyed it very much, but sometimes I feel like the writers sacrifice historical plausibility to create strong female leads for a contemporary audience. Ironically, so many of the GIANTS of computing's earliest days were female. Even at the rank-and-file level, women made up an astonishing number of early programmers. If you talk to retirement age people in our field, you'll find that mainframe developers were commonly female all through the 1960's and 1970's. It wasn't until the PC revolution that the field shifted to become more exclusively male. I wonder when we'll see writers and TV/film producers start to explore that period of history? I'm sure there are some amazing stories that could be told. The crazy thing is, even if you just presented the field as-is without any embellishment, most people would assume that you were re-writing history in the name of political correctness. Most of the general public (hell, most young professionals in our field) just has no idea about this.

pacaro 9y ago
My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my father — at the time married with four children. They were married in September 1969, a month before my brother was born. I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the same thing
- eleumik 9y ago
  probably not the only ones but the first I hear of, you and your brothers also programmers ?
  - pacaro 9y ago
    My older brother is an IT manager, I'm a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my sister has worked variously in real estate, finance, and education. Of my four half-brothers, I believe that two work in the industry (we're not close). One certainly wrote a book on X programming before I even knew what X was!
    - eleumik 9y ago
      fantastic ;-)
- drakonka 9y ago
  I'm 28 and both of my parents were engineers back in Ukraine (at the time Soviet Union). My dad was not primarily a programmer (ended up becoming a marine surveyor), but I am fairly sure he had to be involved with it at some point in his studies and career back then. I remember my mom would bring stacks upon stacks of used punched cards for us to doodle on to avoid wasting blank paper.
FanaHOVA 9y ago
Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.
- bitwize 9y ago
  The truth behind Hidden Figures was in some ways more heartening, but less amenable to a film centered around social-justice issues, than thr movie showed. For instance, Katherine Johnson never had to run all the way across the complex to use the colored bathroom. She used the white ladies' bathroom and no one batted an eyelash. It was not all peaches 'n' gravy for these women and their contributions are unfortunately overlooked today. But Hidden Figures was made to make a point, and its narrative serves that end.
  - tomcam 9y ago
    All true. Downvotes wholly unjustified. Penultimate sentence says it all. Great movie though.
    - WaxProlix 9y ago
      Possibly because it presents these things without any backup sources, and because donning the guise of agreeability but undermining a point (especially a 'social justice' one) is a fairly common tack among 'alt right' and 'dark enlightenment' types. I didn't downvote it, but I can see how someone might reflexively.
    - throwawayhf 9y ago
      It's true but it's also misleading. For instance, it's true that Johnson didn't have to run across the campus to the bathroom, but Jackson did. (And someone did complain about Johnson's use of the unmarked bathroom, but only after she had been working there for long enough she had the social capital to ignore the complaint until segregation nominally ended.) The film does suffer from trying to compress a whole office of computers into just three people, and a whole remaining government bureaucracy into another handful (Costner, Parsons, etc). It also has to do this while covering a part of the space program most people today are not familiar with (technically NACA not NASA, Atlas and earlier). At the same time, it's reasonable to cut out the 90% that's normal office work, because it's boring and doesn't help us understand the time or situation. Most of the events have strong factual footing, with the notable exception of Costner's white savior moment. If you want more information, the book is dry and a little disorganized, but of course much more thorough about the timeline and who did what.
jdblair 9y ago
I started my career in 1996 working in the University mainframe department at UAB (Birmingham, AL) that ran the administrative systems (grades, bursar bills, departmental accounting). Our team was half women, my manager was a woman, and most of the institutional knowledge of the systems was in the head of one amazing woman (Joyce Iannuzzi) who had worked there for 20 years and insisted on working from an original IBM 3270 terminal.
- cratermoon 9y ago
  I've worked with mainframe programmers and power users and they clung to their genuine 3270 terminals for good reason. All the emulators and substitutes had issues with keyboard differences and iffy keymapping.
narrator 9y ago
The way that Halt and Catch Fire was unrealistic is that the women I've known who enjoyed and were good at programming were not emotionally volatile at all. HBO's Silicon Valley does a much better job portraying this personality type.
- amyjess 9y ago
  I stopped watching HCF after the first season because I was tired of the show going out of its way to point out that all the main characters are a bunch of screwed-up emotionally unstable whackjobs. Not just the female characters, either. Remember Gordon's breakdown when he dug up his backyard? Watching the show made me feel like I was babysitting every less-than-stable person I've interacted with all at the same time, and it was so emotionally exhausting I couldn't bring myself to watch another season. It's a shame, too, because I really love the premise of the series. A show about the early days of the PC industry set in my hometown? I was so excited about it... but I just couldn't continue.
brandall10 9y ago
You may find this piece interesting to provide some context to why this was: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
ams6110 9y ago
I wonder if that was because in the very early (punch card) days it was not uncommon for women to be employed as "coders" literally typists who would transcribe code onto cards from written code sheets prepared by programmers. It would be natural for many of them to learn how to program from reading so much code.
anothercomment 9y ago
Even some movies about the male giants would be a start (I guess there was one about Turing, but I haven't seen it). Otoh maybe the subject doesn't lend itself so much to movie making, as most of the action happens inside of people's heads. So far the movies that have been made seem to focus on some other drama going on in the depicted person's lives.

pacaro 9y ago

My mother was a programmer in the mid to late 60s, a job at which she met my father — at the time married with four children. They were married in September 1969, a month before my brother was born. I doubt that my siblings and I are the only 40-something children of two programmers, but I suspect that there are fewer 30-somethings that can say the same thing

eleumik 9y ago
probably not the only ones but the first I hear of, you and your brothers also programmers ?
- pacaro 9y ago
  My older brother is an IT manager, I'm a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my sister has worked variously in real estate, finance, and education. Of my four half-brothers, I believe that two work in the industry (we're not close). One certainly wrote a book on X programming before I even knew what X was!
  - eleumik 9y ago
    fantastic ;-)
drakonka 9y ago
I'm 28 and both of my parents were engineers back in Ukraine (at the time Soviet Union). My dad was not primarily a programmer (ended up becoming a marine surveyor), but I am fairly sure he had to be involved with it at some point in his studies and career back then. I remember my mom would bring stacks upon stacks of used punched cards for us to doodle on to avoid wasting blank paper.

FanaHOVA 9y ago

Also see "Hidden Figures" for a real story about undervalued women (or at least at first) in the science field.

bitwize 9y ago
The truth behind Hidden Figures was in some ways more heartening, but less amenable to a film centered around social-justice issues, than thr movie showed. For instance, Katherine Johnson never had to run all the way across the complex to use the colored bathroom. She used the white ladies' bathroom and no one batted an eyelash. It was not all peaches 'n' gravy for these women and their contributions are unfortunately overlooked today. But Hidden Figures was made to make a point, and its narrative serves that end.
- tomcam 9y ago
  All true. Downvotes wholly unjustified. Penultimate sentence says it all. Great movie though.
  - WaxProlix 9y ago
    Possibly because it presents these things without any backup sources, and because donning the guise of agreeability but undermining a point (especially a 'social justice' one) is a fairly common tack among 'alt right' and 'dark enlightenment' types. I didn't downvote it, but I can see how someone might reflexively.
  - throwawayhf 9y ago
    It's true but it's also misleading. For instance, it's true that Johnson didn't have to run across the campus to the bathroom, but Jackson did. (And someone did complain about Johnson's use of the unmarked bathroom, but only after she had been working there for long enough she had the social capital to ignore the complaint until segregation nominally ended.) The film does suffer from trying to compress a whole office of computers into just three people, and a whole remaining government bureaucracy into another handful (Costner, Parsons, etc). It also has to do this while covering a part of the space program most people today are not familiar with (technically NACA not NASA, Atlas and earlier). At the same time, it's reasonable to cut out the 90% that's normal office work, because it's boring and doesn't help us understand the time or situation. Most of the events have strong factual footing, with the notable exception of Costner's white savior moment. If you want more information, the book is dry and a little disorganized, but of course much more thorough about the timeline and who did what.

jdblair 9y ago

I started my career in 1996 working in the University mainframe department at UAB (Birmingham, AL) that ran the administrative systems (grades, bursar bills, departmental accounting). Our team was half women, my manager was a woman, and most of the institutional knowledge of the systems was in the head of one amazing woman (Joyce Iannuzzi) who had worked there for 20 years and insisted on working from an original IBM 3270 terminal.

cratermoon 9y ago
I've worked with mainframe programmers and power users and they clung to their genuine 3270 terminals for good reason. All the emulators and substitutes had issues with keyboard differences and iffy keymapping.

narrator 9y ago

The way that Halt and Catch Fire was unrealistic is that the women I've known who enjoyed and were good at programming were not emotionally volatile at all. HBO's Silicon Valley does a much better job portraying this personality type.

amyjess 9y ago
I stopped watching HCF after the first season because I was tired of the show going out of its way to point out that all the main characters are a bunch of screwed-up emotionally unstable whackjobs. Not just the female characters, either. Remember Gordon's breakdown when he dug up his backyard? Watching the show made me feel like I was babysitting every less-than-stable person I've interacted with all at the same time, and it was so emotionally exhausting I couldn't bring myself to watch another season. It's a shame, too, because I really love the premise of the series. A show about the early days of the PC industry set in my hometown? I was so excited about it... but I just couldn't continue.

brandall10 9y ago

You may find this piece interesting to provide some context to why this was: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-%E2%80%9Ccomputer-geeks%E2%80%9D-replaced-%E2%80%9Ccomputergirls%E2%80%9D http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...

ams6110 9y ago

I wonder if that was because in the very early (punch card) days it was not uncommon for women to be employed as "coders" literally typists who would transcribe code onto cards from written code sheets prepared by programmers. It would be natural for many of them to learn how to program from reading so much code.

anothercomment 9y ago

Even some movies about the male giants would be a start (I guess there was one about Turing, but I haven't seen it). Otoh maybe the subject doesn't lend itself so much to movie making, as most of the action happens inside of people's heads. So far the movies that have been made seem to focus on some other drama going on in the depicted person's lives.