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What Bell Labs Was Like C.1967 (theguardian.com)
New submitter niittyniemi writes: There's a rather interesting photo-gallery over at The Guardian
which gives an indication of what life was like at Bell Labs c.1967.
This was the year that Dennis
Ritchie joined Bell Labs and went on to produce a body of work which has
been pretty much unrivaled in its influence on the modern computing
landscape, even some 50 years later.
What's noticeable about the pictures, is that they are of woman. I don't
think this is a result of the photographer just photographing "eye candy." I
think it's because he was surrounded by women, whom from his comments he
very much respected and hence photographed.
In those times, wrangling with a computer was very much seen as "clerical
work" and therefore the domain of woman. This can be seen as far back as
Bletchley Park and before that Ada Lovelace.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle. Look at any IT
company and the percentage of women doing software development or similar is
woeful. Why and how has this happened? Discuss.
Historically some cultures had primarily male clerical workers. Up till recently some had primarily female welders. Social context makes difference. Women have not been excluded for lack of capability. The decline is a sign of sociological bias because of where industry manufacturing was located.
Also decline of unskilled labor jobs in manufacturing after the decline of post war government funding of large projects drove more men to clerical (techie) jobs. The jobs were just rebranded to make them palatable to the post world war 2 cohort.
The cold war created the last of the big science jobs funded by government. Many of hose jobs were in research labs and clerical.
What actually happened in North America was grunt jobs disappeared and the grunts began to occupy the clerical space to make a living. This at it's best would reduce the clerical jobs available to women by 50%.
So, it probably wasn't a sexist plot. Just a shift in markets.
Yet 50 years later, the IT industry has turned full-circle.
If the industry had turned full-circle then it would be full of women again. Instead it seems that the industry has done a vile 180.
... although I am worried that I be labelled as a misogynist for even suggesting it, I believe that the reason there may be fewer women working in that industry than there used to be is because back then it was more likely that women had keyboarding skills they may have acquired in training for secretary type positions that men were simply not as likely to aspire to become. While obviously technical training was still required to do the job, the additional factor of being more likely to have acquired the auxiliary training of being able to type quickly I feel would have doubtless led to fewer men being competitive for those positions in that era.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Women were not treated like underling eye candy. Your generalization matches propaganda, but propaganda does not match reality. Any attempt at explaining very complex social and economic issues with simple gender claims is wrong, and will be wrong.
Women in the 60s and 70s were looked upon with sadness and sympathy if they had to work. If a woman had to work, it was because her husband was not capable of supporting his family. If the guy was not in bad medical straights, he was a loser, a bum, an alcoholic, or an addict. Some women worked for the greater good, namely in sciences and teaching, but generally speaking it was frowned upon. Nothing at all to do with sexism, or the patriarchy holding women down. This modern push to get women working in careers for as long as possible before having a family, if they have a family is a newer trend brought to you by social engineers. It is not beneficial for society, it's beneficial for the wealthy who can cash in on the commercialism. It's also a great way of manipulating an economy to make it look progressive, when at the root it is nothing more than a string of broken window fallacies.
Women working in the sciences was actually common. Glamorized jobs for women didn't come about until the later 70s early 80s. Then women didn't want to work in Science, they wanted to work where they could do what they saw on TV and advertisements. Make huge bucks with sex appeal, marry that rich guy she worked with, and live happily ever after in the mansion. Scientists don't make money, and didn't then either.
Look at when development were made for like disposable diapers, fast food, the microwave, baby formula. Suddenly this fantasy about men abusing women by not letting them sit in an office for 45-50 hours a week will dissipate. Then you have to work on dispelling the more recent propaganda.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Tape library work really was clerical work.
The computer would put up a number, the tape librarian would find the tape with that number and mount it.
That was drudge work, and those jobs are just plain gone. Most storage is on-line now, and what isn't is near-line where the tapes are located and mounted by robots.
I'm not saying women didn't do technical computer work then. But many of these jobs are non-technical. And the statement these women aren't eye candy is undercut by the fact that they are (almost) all dressed up and in some cases showing off their wall hangings.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It was a telephone company and employed a huge number of women in it's office based roles (rather than it's outdoor service roles) so there was a career path for them that opened doors to jobs associated with computing. So what has happened, nothing, now the jobs don't exist that lead to those other jobs, that mostly don't exist either. To confuse the work environment then and now and the skills that are in demand is a mistake.
Fascinating. Honestly, fascinating.
I would characterise it more as "somewhat weird, possibly creepy". If you look at the notes accompanying the photos, it seems like the guy was also responsible for hiring them all. He then bought them materials to make artwork for the walls. That's just a wee bit odd.
You can obviously interpret it in many ways, ranging from positive to negative: He was a big supporter of women in the workplace, he was overly paternalistic, he was a bit creepy... in any case I don't think you can generalise from this to the computer industry as a whole.
Cooling in machine rooms might have had something to do with it. Try wearing a Sixties-style sleeveless dress in a computer room or data hall today
Yeah but to be honest it pretty much wouldn't have mattered what the summary said. The people who got angry were the all the usual suspects and are part of the perpetually offended crowd who seem to believe that the efforts to get diversity in tech mean that everyone hates straight white men like them and is always out to get them by accusing them of rape or some such nonsense.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The submitter of this article did not work at the Labs during the Dennis Ritchie era.
Women at that time held repetitive jobs that engineers weren't allowed to perform. It doesn't mean that we didn't appreciate their work. We did. They made our own time much more productive.
What we lacked in those days was the instant feedback that we needed to catch bugs. That is the biggest area where our work environment was not productive. And we had to fight tooth and nail to get TSO terminals and mini-computers before the age of desktops, laptops, and blade servers ushered in the modern office.
The luckiest sons of guns at that time were scientists who had 24 hour access to a terminal in a lab, somewhere, like Lincoln Labs.
So the submitter used words like "wrangling" with computers, because he didn't actually work at the Labs at that time. Sorry, chap, but you missed the picture entirely.
You should focus more on Dennis Ritchie's contribution and where open software is headed today.
Thank goodness we're no longer constrained by FORTRAN architecture, batch jobs, reams of paper to recycle, hexadecimal dumps, card readers, and key punch machines.
We have bigger problems to worry about, like the corporate takeover of so-called open software. The bazaar is becoming more like a medieval cathedral every day. The bazaar is just the thin layer at the top.
to be fair black people have more privilege, everyone bends over backwards to be more inclusive of the poor dears.
In reality, white people make up about 75% of the population of the USA (even more in places like the UK), so there's a bigger pool of talent to choose from.
The idea that white people are privileged is a bit of identity politics from the black and identity-politics brigade that seeks to denigrate white people and promote blacks (same applies to women, for example, this isn't a racist thing) saying things like "only white people can be racist because they're privileged", meaning any excuse to promote inequality in favour of a particular group is acceptable because they are not white males.
Probably a late 80s thing, to be sure, because even at Atari, there were significant female population creating video games, and there were many females in the history of computer science as well.
I say 80s because that's when Nintendo came out, after the crash. They did one clever thing to get their NES on store shelves, and it may have had unintended consequences.
First, you have to remember the video game crash of the early 80s - it got to the point where retailers were shying away from anything videogame-related. So how does a company like Nintendo get their videogame machine in stores where retailers refuse to stock videogames?
Easy - you sell it as a toy that kids play with. But here's the rub - toy stores were (and generally still are) separated by gender - you have boy's toys on one set of aisles, and girl's toys on another set, and they will not mix. Nintendo now had a problem - is it a boy's toy or a girl's toy - it can only be one.
They chose boy.
This has very interesting ramifications - first, the Atari and other early console ads featured a whole family playing videogames - father, mother, daughter, son - all gathered around the TV and playing together. After this, Nintendo ads primarily featured boys - since that's how they decided to sell them. No more parents nor daughters - just boys gathering around playing.
Which may explain the perchant for people to regard videogames as what kids do, but not adults (because it was sold as a toy for boys, not the entire family), as well as regarding it as a male endeavour - again, Nintendo marketing as a boy's toy.
Other cultures didn't have this. Japan didn't have a videogame crash, and other countries didn't have to market exclusively to boys, so the whole videogame/computer association with boys never got made through marketing.