Because if you could get your code right on paper and not have to use any (or much) expensive time on a mainframe to further debug and test, you were way ahead of the game both in terms of the time it took you to produce shippable code and also in terms of the expense of shipping that code.
Shirley’s mostly women programmers at Freelance Programmers were extremely good at this (I’m not just saying this, they kept stats on themselves & compared it to their competitors) and as a result were able to produce software for major companies & governmental agencies both on time & for less cost.
Not that many girls (Chicago public high schools) were interested (in mid-Sixties).
That may be one reason that you don’t see a ton of images of them with computers—ironically better programmers back then didn’t need to hang out in machine rooms as much!😅 bsky.app/profile/hist...
What's the baby doing now?
Legend has it she is still distracting programmers to this day… (Just kidding, I don’t actually know what her daughter does.)
I’m gonna link to info on both Moffatt’s memoir (which is really personal, interesting, and at times horrifying) and Shirley’s (which is more polished but also quite personal): www.fitt.org.au/the-it-girl-... www.steveshirley.com/books/
Thank you! I love reading about the pioneers in my field of work.
When I started in the 70s It could take an hour or more to compile and link your program before testing it. We worked through the design and logic thoroughly on paper first as well as closely proofreading for typos before submitting a job. Getting it working in one submission was the goal.
Although the IDE has replaced the paper, programmers in the 2020s would do well to adopt these practices and goal.
In my later career (just retired!) I was primarily in integration and test and I was amazed that testing was no longer considered part of the developer’s job. If it passed the little unit test it went on to me. Fair division of work but I would have been shamed to let anyone else debug my code.
My Dad used to write mainframe OS software, and in the early days had to rent time on other people’s machines to test it which meant working nights. (About 15 years ago he worked out the HDD he’d just picked up for £80 would have cost something like £3m back then… per month)
In my 1977 computer science class, we did our assignments on a time-sharing system with terminals. We had to go to the computer lab and type in and run our assignments. My standard practice was to write out and check my code on paper, then go to the lab and try it. \1
Many of my classmates walked in with nothing and starting composing at the terminal. I was usually finished and out of the lab long before those classmates. \2
This is very great words.hope you are doing fine