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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).
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.
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.
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
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.