September 2, 2011 at 15:16My grandmother is a programmer
I am a third-generation programmer: the first programmer in the family was my grandmother, then my mother, and now I continued the tradition. I asked my grandmother to tell us what her career looked like, which began more than half a century ago.
According to the reference book for applicants, which described existing universities, faculties and specialties, my grandmother chose the mechanics department of Shevchenko National University of Kyiv . My grandmother finished school with a silver medal, which in those days simplified the procedure for admission to an oral interview.
The Faculty of Cybernetics opened only ten years later, but for now, the mechmath has trained specialists in mathematics and theoretical mechanics. Upon admission, there was no separation according to future specializations - the first two courses studied together, and the third was divided by specialties. Grandma’s graduation in 1959 was the first in which the specialization “computational mathematics” appeared. As part of this specialization, theoretical courses were taught that were completely new for that time: programming, the construction of analog machines, the construction of digital machines, computational methods (mainly methods for solving differential equations and problems of linear algebra) ... Not only students but also employees of Computational attended lectures Center of the Academy of Sciences - there were often no other sources of new knowledge. List of diploma with a list of subjects
It was harder to practice. Computers - then still "electronic computers" - were piece goods that the university could not afford. Therefore, during the academic year, they read theoretical material, and in the summer students went to practice where the computers were. After the third year, my grandmother had a practice at Kiev MESM. Students were not allowed to real tasks, and I suspect that MESM personnel would not have allowed students to go to the machine itself: the practice began with a kind-hearted student taking pity on the dusty mechanism and carefully wiping a thick layer of dust from it, after which the contacts of all the rubbed lamps went astray, and the car had to be reconfigured again. Practiced educational tasks, including game programming. The student chose a game, for example, tic-tac-toe, studied popular magazines that described the algorithms of the game, and encoded them. After that, the program could be run on a computer and its output to check how it worked.
After the fourth year of undergraduate practice, my grandmother left for Moscow to work at Moscow State University on the Strela machine. The tasks were already more serious, but still educational, mostly linear algebra.
Programming languages as such did not exist yet - around this time in the West Algol and FORTRAN only appeared. All scientific Kiev was going to listen to reports about Algol-60 V.M. Glushkov , director of the CC of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, based on his trip to the USA. But before the introduction of programming languages, we were still far away. All machines of those times worked on machine codes - each on its own system.
In addition to doctors and candidates, we have people who work!
Feofan Stepanovich, deputy. deer by household. parts
After university, my grandmother worked in the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR - first as a simple engineer, then as a senior engineer and, finally, as a leader. In total, at that time the staff of the EC was about 300 people: software engineers, technical engineers, specialists in analog machines (the main ones were still digital) and testers who checked the results of the programs on rheinmetals (German electromechanical calculating machines).
What did the employees of the EC who were not involved in the development of new computer models, including grandmother? In our time, this would be called outsourcing - the CC concluded agreements with organizations that needed numerical solutions to some problems, representatives of organizations formalized tasks, and employees solved and coded. So, for example, one of the tasks of the department was to calculate the optimal mode for Bessemer converters . Grandmother solved the problems of structural mechanics.
From computers to the EC were first “Kiev” , then - a three-address BESM. Machine codes, punched cards (and before them - punched tapes, which were made from illuminated films) - and many stories that you can’t hear today. About people who, in thought or nerves, shuffled a deck of unsigned punch cards. About how people who were far from programming drove tours to the computer, and explained to them the principle of the machine. One of them asked the same question several times; after another explanation, when the guide’s nerves were already at the limit, he was indignant, “Well, what are you explaining to me, I’ve understood something for a long time, but here it is” - a gesture towards the peacefully rustling computer - “does she understand how?” The fact that there was always not enough computer time, so mathematicians often worked at night - and the punch closed at the end of the working day. At night, I had to edit the punched cards with the code manually - cut through the missing holes and glue the excess pieces of cardboard left over from automatic punching. Computer operators did not approve of manual punch cards - nothing was cut through yet, but glued pieces could fall off inside the input device and disable it. However, usually the victory remained with the bright side of the force - mathematicians.
1965 - 1988. Zonal Research Institute of Experimental Design (ZNIIEP)
In 1965, the grandmother moved to ZNIIEP as the chief specialist, later the chief design engineer. This organization was already outsourcing less, and basically solved its own tasks - designed residential and public buildings, programmed methods of structural analysis and solved design automation tasks (created specialized drawing tools such as AutoCAD).
Oh, the eternal problem of those times is machine time! Partly he was rented in the EC, partly - they used their own car, “Nairi”. The machine was of Armenian origin, and allowed to enter programs not only in codes, but also in the internal programming language - Cyrillic, but with a corresponding accent. It is because of this emphasis that the following story has occurred. Written and debugged programs for calculating the elements were collected together and published in the form of printed brochures, which were used to transfer programs to other machines or for subsequent work. Brochures were approached responsibly and read carefully before publication. Once the collection of programs for Nairi fell into the hands of a corrector who did not really imagine her programming language, but was very sick for the purity of the Russian language in the ranks of programmers. Result? The "read" programs, ideally correct from the grammatical point of view, completely stopped working in the Nairi language.
The programmer’s work at ZNIIEP involved frequent business trips — to the cities of the USSR to customer organizations, to clarify the problem statement, and to other countries — to exchange experience. Of course, most were released only to the countries of the socialist camps, communication with the programmers of the capitalist countries took place exclusively at the leadership level, but trips to Bulgaria and guests from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also good.
By the way, it is difficult to say how exotic the work of the programmer was seen by people uninitiated at that time - my grandmother’s husband and all their friends and acquaintances were from the same or related professions.
There was no special relation to female programmers - there were a lot of them both at the university and at work, and this did not surprise anyone. Apparently, the outrageous stereotype about guinea pigs definitely belongs to a later period.
1954-1959. Higher education
According to the reference book for applicants, which described existing universities, faculties and specialties, my grandmother chose the mechanics department of Shevchenko National University of Kyiv . My grandmother finished school with a silver medal, which in those days simplified the procedure for admission to an oral interview.
The Faculty of Cybernetics opened only ten years later, but for now, the mechmath has trained specialists in mathematics and theoretical mechanics. Upon admission, there was no separation according to future specializations - the first two courses studied together, and the third was divided by specialties. Grandma’s graduation in 1959 was the first in which the specialization “computational mathematics” appeared. As part of this specialization, theoretical courses were taught that were completely new for that time: programming, the construction of analog machines, the construction of digital machines, computational methods (mainly methods for solving differential equations and problems of linear algebra) ... Not only students but also employees of Computational attended lectures Center of the Academy of Sciences - there were often no other sources of new knowledge. List of diploma with a list of subjects
It was harder to practice. Computers - then still "electronic computers" - were piece goods that the university could not afford. Therefore, during the academic year, they read theoretical material, and in the summer students went to practice where the computers were. After the third year, my grandmother had a practice at Kiev MESM. Students were not allowed to real tasks, and I suspect that MESM personnel would not have allowed students to go to the machine itself: the practice began with a kind-hearted student taking pity on the dusty mechanism and carefully wiping a thick layer of dust from it, after which the contacts of all the rubbed lamps went astray, and the car had to be reconfigured again. Practiced educational tasks, including game programming. The student chose a game, for example, tic-tac-toe, studied popular magazines that described the algorithms of the game, and encoded them. After that, the program could be run on a computer and its output to check how it worked.
After the fourth year of undergraduate practice, my grandmother left for Moscow to work at Moscow State University on the Strela machine. The tasks were already more serious, but still educational, mostly linear algebra.
Programming languages as such did not exist yet - around this time in the West Algol and FORTRAN only appeared. All scientific Kiev was going to listen to reports about Algol-60 V.M. Glushkov , director of the CC of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, based on his trip to the USA. But before the introduction of programming languages, we were still far away. All machines of those times worked on machine codes - each on its own system.
1959 - 1965. Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR
In addition to doctors and candidates, we have people who work!
Feofan Stepanovich, deputy. deer by household. parts
After university, my grandmother worked in the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR - first as a simple engineer, then as a senior engineer and, finally, as a leader. In total, at that time the staff of the EC was about 300 people: software engineers, technical engineers, specialists in analog machines (the main ones were still digital) and testers who checked the results of the programs on rheinmetals (German electromechanical calculating machines).
What did the employees of the EC who were not involved in the development of new computer models, including grandmother? In our time, this would be called outsourcing - the CC concluded agreements with organizations that needed numerical solutions to some problems, representatives of organizations formalized tasks, and employees solved and coded. So, for example, one of the tasks of the department was to calculate the optimal mode for Bessemer converters . Grandmother solved the problems of structural mechanics.
From computers to the EC were first “Kiev” , then - a three-address BESM. Machine codes, punched cards (and before them - punched tapes, which were made from illuminated films) - and many stories that you can’t hear today. About people who, in thought or nerves, shuffled a deck of unsigned punch cards. About how people who were far from programming drove tours to the computer, and explained to them the principle of the machine. One of them asked the same question several times; after another explanation, when the guide’s nerves were already at the limit, he was indignant, “Well, what are you explaining to me, I’ve understood something for a long time, but here it is” - a gesture towards the peacefully rustling computer - “does she understand how?” The fact that there was always not enough computer time, so mathematicians often worked at night - and the punch closed at the end of the working day. At night, I had to edit the punched cards with the code manually - cut through the missing holes and glue the excess pieces of cardboard left over from automatic punching. Computer operators did not approve of manual punch cards - nothing was cut through yet, but glued pieces could fall off inside the input device and disable it. However, usually the victory remained with the bright side of the force - mathematicians.
1965 - 1988. Zonal Research Institute of Experimental Design (ZNIIEP)
1988 - 1996. Scientific Research Institute of Theory of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIITAG)
In 1965, the grandmother moved to ZNIIEP as the chief specialist, later the chief design engineer. This organization was already outsourcing less, and basically solved its own tasks - designed residential and public buildings, programmed methods of structural analysis and solved design automation tasks (created specialized drawing tools such as AutoCAD).
Oh, the eternal problem of those times is machine time! Partly he was rented in the EC, partly - they used their own car, “Nairi”. The machine was of Armenian origin, and allowed to enter programs not only in codes, but also in the internal programming language - Cyrillic, but with a corresponding accent. It is because of this emphasis that the following story has occurred. Written and debugged programs for calculating the elements were collected together and published in the form of printed brochures, which were used to transfer programs to other machines or for subsequent work. Brochures were approached responsibly and read carefully before publication. Once the collection of programs for Nairi fell into the hands of a corrector who did not really imagine her programming language, but was very sick for the purity of the Russian language in the ranks of programmers. Result? The "read" programs, ideally correct from the grammatical point of view, completely stopped working in the Nairi language.
The programmer’s work at ZNIIEP involved frequent business trips — to the cities of the USSR to customer organizations, to clarify the problem statement, and to other countries — to exchange experience. Of course, most were released only to the countries of the socialist camps, communication with the programmers of the capitalist countries took place exclusively at the leadership level, but trips to Bulgaria and guests from Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also good.
By the way, it is difficult to say how exotic the work of the programmer was seen by people uninitiated at that time - my grandmother’s husband and all their friends and acquaintances were from the same or related professions.
There was no special relation to female programmers - there were a lot of them both at the university and at work, and this did not surprise anyone. Apparently, the outrageous stereotype about guinea pigs definitely belongs to a later period.