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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.
I think the simplest explanation for why women fled the tech industry is that the industry became toxic due to
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
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.
The women who first worked with computers were treated like underling eye-candy, and told their daughters to avoid that shit like the plague? And their granddaughters now see it as a field where wages are going down, where they still get treated like second rate coders (even when they are not), and they are still avoiding that shit like the plague?
Shit, I'm not sure why any male wants to get into IT these days, never mind the ladies.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
Dennis Ritchie worked at the Murray Hill, NJ campus, which is also where the transistor was invented, etc. These photos are from some Oakland, CA location.
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.
Look around at the field of garbage collection, there aren't many women there either but I don't hear you complaining about it.
That's because writing garbage collectors is a man's job.
bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
Bell Labs existed to spend money - provided it was on research that had SOME plausible connection to improving the state of the art of telephony.
This was because, as part of the legislative deal that gave Bell a near-monopoly on telephony, they were allowed to set their rates to return a regulated percentage on their expenses, and those expenses included such research.
Suppose this rate was 6%:
1. Spend a hundred million dollars researching, designing, and delivering telephone service.
2. Set the phone rates so you collect 106 million dollars.
3. Deliver the phone service and collect the money.
4. Profit! (six million dollars of it).
Spend more on research, raise the rates, make more profit. So the incentive is to shoehorn in as much basic research as you can possibly manage to SOMEHOW connect to telephony and spend as much as you can on it. So spending money in this profitable way is what Bell Labs was intended to do.
But they get to (were REQUIRED to) license their inventions. And the money from these licenses counts against their costs. From year one they made more on licensing inventions than they spent on research. So they were a "failure" at their original purpose, but the poster child that proved basic research was a money-maker, big time, even though you didn't know in advance HOW you'd end up making money off it.
This continued through the Bell breakup, the spinout as Lucent technologies, and didn't get broken until about the new millenium, when management pulled a standard loot-the-company stunt: improving the bottom line (and their bonuses and options) by cutting off research that wouldn't pay off until a few years down the road (when they're gone, their money is safe, and their successors get to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.) A few years back some of the old hands were brought back to revive the near-corpse, and it seems to be on the mend.
Xerox PARC's opportunity to create wonders out of basic research was also enabled by an accounting pathology - though of a much different sort.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
Bullshit, I've been reading this since before 9/11. While I will admit that articles "like this" were not nearly as common back then, there was a ton of other not really relevant or great stuff back then too. Remember Jon Katz? This site was always a mix of democrats and conservatives, with a socially liberal, fiscally conservative lean if you had to assign it one. This summary doesn't beg some kind of SJW agenda either, it simply begs a question. How is asking how demographics in the workplace changed being a "justice warrior"? I think a lot of people are sort of mystified why there aren't more women in tech (usually those who don't actually work in it).
There is literally no job that is available to a man that isn't also available to a similarly capable woman.
Sperm donation.
Bullshit. Slashdot has had a wide variety of articles and a wide variety of viewpoints back in the day.
What has made Slashdot into "what it is today" are neaderthal neckbeards like yourself who have the self control of a toddler and can't simply scroll past articles that don't interest them. Instead, they come into them and shit all over the place and get modded up by their equally ignorant and intolerant cronies.
These neanderthal neckbeards weren't what made Slashdot - but they are what is destroying it.
The English language is being pummeled into submission by reddit style reporting on the front page. Discuss.
Most of the pics in the article were of woman doing clerical and data entry. These job functions have been largely automated. So it would kind of make sense that the more we automate away the jobs that woman performed in tech, the less women will be there.
Am I missing something? The article is SJW bate right? But content of the article don't seem conducive towards an good old fashion SJW flame war.
But did the site have stupid 4chan/reddit style English grammar at the time? Discuss.
If I might play devil's advocate here. The fact there were once far more women in IT is often brought up in the shortage of woman in IT situation. The idea is to say "see, woman must have loved to do engineering work until those evil white males drove them away with their neckbeards".
However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
So, at least according to the article, we know the cause of the decline of woman in the IT workplace. We just have less of a call for tape librarians.
That last line sounded kind of sexist now that I read it can. Feel free to burn some of my karma to get me square with the gods of Social Justice.
They were still in use at Bell Labs in 1997 when I left. On Vaxen.
Looks more to me like you're trying to project your ideological hangups onto a completely unrelated story because ZOMG pictures of wimmins next to computers, it's a plot to castrate us all.
*eyeroll*
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Agreed, but what I would say has changed is that the summaries are now trolling. This could have been presented a number of ways, just like the Code of Conduct story the other day which was a total non-controversy, but the summary trolled us and made a lot of people (who naturally didn't RTFA) angry.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Take a look at how male software people treat women and you got your answer. The main reason a -admittedly good-looking- female friend of mine doesn't have a degree in CS is that she was shocked by all the drooling guys in college. During the new student orientation week, there was always this 'magic number' buzzing around: How many females dared to show up. I sometimes really felt embarrassed by my fellow male students.
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.
> software development is engineering, not clerical work
Thanks God Agile is changing that.
It's ironic that all the things they accuse "SJWs" of - being perpetually offended, wanting to silence others and shut down debates, demanding everyone agree with them and labelling any dissent as abuse and harassment - is all the stuff they themselves are doing.
Then they tell you to grow a thicker skin, while being unable to scroll past articles they don't like without getting offended themselves.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Do Americans also do this IRL? I mean, posit something and then end with: 'discuss'? I mean, it's annoying in message boards, but bloody hell that would make me lose it if someone were to say that to me in the flesh.
I propose that any post that ends with 'discuss.' is automatically deleted by /.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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 should keep in mind the The Guardian chose those photos from a larger collection to highlight the presence (and hairstyles) of computer women of the 60s. I don't think buying art supplies for your team is necessarily any more creepy than buying them Nerf guns, fitbits, or a foosball table. Pick distractions that fit the tastes and interests of your team.
The vast majority of women today don't do those things, just as some guys do those things today.
You're going to have to try better than using "INSERT AGED STEREOTYPES HERE" as an argument. Your wonderful use of illogical generalisations and the masterful false dichotomy at the end really drive home just how vapid your argument is.
Do you tell all the women you know in your life just how much contempt you seem to have for them? Or do you hold this attitude just towards women you don't know or like? If that's the case, how can you explain including the women you do appreciate in the same gross generalisations?
The mind boggles...
However from actually reading the article I'm only seeing low level support personnel. The kind of job that is usually made obsolete by a combination of technology and an efficient workplace.
You mean the same types of low level support positions that are replaced by H1Bs before they're completely automated?
How is it that slashdotters can identify and call out the "low level support personnel" when looking at a photo from decades ago but don't realize they're in the exact same position now?
If you're doing things the same way you've been doing them for the last N years, then you're about to be completely automated so that the rest of us can start working in the 2050 'efficient workplace'.
The reddit account isn't me. In fact, on the first page of Google results only the Slashdot account is me, the Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, Sourceforge and Deviant Art accounts are not me. I thought it was a fairly unique name, but I guess not.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
TL;DR - The ROI for IT sucks in comparison to a lot of other fields. For whatever reason, women as a whole see this better and adjust. I'd like to submit my perspective. These are my observations, so please don't take them as gospel. I grew up in IT back in the 80s as a SysOp for mainframes. I've had two great mentors on the technical side and the first was a women back in the mid 80's Back then, there was a much higher percentage of woman in the field and more importantly the level of skill across the board (all genders) was MUCH higher. For example, a junior SysOp (sysadmin in today's terms) was *expected* to know how to script and a senior SysOp was *expected* to know how to port C code between different Unix flavors (but not necessarily write C from scratch). I'll refer to these people as the pre-IT workforce. How does this relate to woman leaving the field? I'll get there. When windows hit the corporate world, the demand for IT skills soared. To help meet this demand, the industry developed the GUI and promoted it as a graphical ADMIN interface as opposed to a graphical USER interface. This reduced the level of skill for new sysadmins entering the field (we're finally starting to shed the GUI crutch thanks to cloud scalability). Most of the people who entered at this time were not as skilled as the generation immediately preceding them. The GUI made the easy easier and the hard MUCH harder. A lot of people who were in that preceding generation of pre-IT workers were accustomed to do very hard and difficult work (the women included of course). Unfortunately, windows was not only new but also made it much harder to do the difficult things the pre-IT workforce was accustomed to. Because of this and inadequate corporate training programs, a lot of the people from the pre-IT workforce did not transition over to the IT workforce in time and a lot of their jobs were lost because the large companies in which they worked were transitioning to the IT world. It doesn't help that a lot of these companies also saw this as an opportunity to replace their higher-paid pre-IT workforce with more junior IT workers. Those pre-IT workers exiting the workforce did not generally recommend IT careers to their children, especially the women. So why didn't other women enter the workforce? When the easy was made easier and the hard was made harder, it really distorted the the ROI model for staff. Previously, anyone who got over the initial training hump and familiarization (command line and all) generally had what it took to eventually go on to porting C code if not writing it themselves (and other related advanced tasks). This all changed with the GUI. Large numbers of folks entered who were skilled enough to do some basic work with a GUI but a large percentage of them would not be able to handle the command line or scripting. This was entirely intentional as the workforce needed to grow and one way to do that is to lower the barriers for entry. Whereas before the pay scale took advantage of the fact that there was a relatively easy glide path to mastery, the new pay scale curve never adjusted to sufficiently motivate most of the new workforce to reach for a level of skill commensurate with/analogous to that of the advanced pre-IT workforce. Instead, that top-tier was effectively removed. Additionally, since the field really took off in the early 90's it required a significant amount of work just to maintain currency with emerging topics, let alone advance. All of this adds up to the fact that the ROI from a workers perspective is not as generous as other fields. As a point of comparison other than medical school, how many times a month does a dermatologist or general practitioner expect to solve a new problem - or are they just re-solving problems they've already solved?