Now, onto the main show.

Women in tech

In the last newsletter, I shared a story about the pivot point in the 1980s when the number of women studying computer science began to decline. 

So it’s worth noting that the decade prior was a boon for women in “the computer profession.” This article estimates that, between 1960 and 1969, the “feminine ranks” in programming swelled from 2% to 25%.

Why? According to the article, part of it was disillusionment with the “glamour jobs” in publishing and advertising that women might have sought in the past. (Young professionals in those industries would “wind up doing dreary routine typing in an obscure corner of that big slick firm and feeling like Cinderella without a godmother,” the piece claims.)

But there was also the appeal of the tech industry, which offered “plenty of independence coupled with high challenge,” as well as “a five-figure salary.” Trainees were paid $7,000 a year, or about $50,000 in 2021 dollars. With four years of experience, that figure went up to $18,000 to $25,000--or $125,000 to $175,000 in 2021.

The piece profiles Edie, a 26-year-old senior systems analyst. She was, in 21st-century parlance, a baller: “Edie hasn’t eaten a meal in her luxury East Side Manhattan apartment for three years. Date or not, it’s a different restaurant each night. She can’t recall the last time she scoured her sunken bathtub. There’s a maid in each day to do things like that.” She also drove a sports car: a red Morgan that might have looked something like this. 

“I really can’t spend all I make,” Edie said. “And I assure you, I try.”

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Portable computers

Old computers were big. Everyone knows that. The computer I’m using to write this, on the other hand, is small. You didn’t know that, but you probably assumed. 

The early days of portable computing were wild. Some “portables” weren’t really portable, weighing over twenty pounds and featuring a handle attached to the body to, you know, suggest portability. Others were, indeed, portable—this 1981 article is about units that fit in briefcases—but they weren’t necessarily computers as we think of them. These “computers” consisted of components like keyboards and modems (portable) that you could connect to peripherals like TVs or phone lines (decidedly not portable). Still: the article calls them “little mini marvels” and closes with this zinger: “Sound farfetched? So did horseless carriages and flying machines.”

Computer strike

On the morning of July 19, 1973, dozens of computers all over the world refused to turn on. Now we have a word for that sort of thing—“outage”—but back then, people defaulted to an anthropomorphic metaphor: the computers were “on strike.”

IBM, who manufactured the delinquent machines, wrung their hands (“we have no factual information that it even happened”), leaving the operators to find a fix for themselves. Which they did: they figured out they could solve the problem by telling the computers that “it wasn’t really July 19, 1973.”

It’s unclear why that worked. People theorized that the failure was due to a security update set to be deployed on July 19, the 200th day of the year. I also can’t help but noticed that “07/19” repeats the first three digits of “1973,” and also that the unix timestamp for the date in the UK, where the problem was first spotted, is “11188800,” which is a suspiciously neat number.

Either way: Y2K did happen—in 1973.

Computer marriage

In 1965, Paul Kalkwarf and Louise Farmer celebrated their one-year anniversary. It was news-worthy because of how they met: They were paired by a computer.

The match-making took place at a college dance, where a computer put Kalkwarf and Farmer together based on their answers to two hundred questions. “The questionnaires asked about all sorts of things,” The Kalkwarfs said. “Hobbies and personal appearance and family background and in what size city you’d want to live.” Paul received a list with three potential matches. He danced with them all, but he was struck by Louise: “I thought, ‘She’s good-looking; pretty face and hair.’” For her part, Louise thought, “He’s tall; that’s nice.” He complimented her scarf, which was a good move. “Fellows don’t usually mention things like that,” Louise said.

“We spent most of the evening comparing our answers to the questions,” they said. “It was an unusual situation. You usually don’t have an opportunity to find out so many things about another person right away.” 

A year into their marriage, the couple seemed “delighted to discover, day by day, that they like the same things.” They agreed on furniture (preferring a “simple, modern style of teakwood”), foods (“pork chops, chicken, and casserole dishes” were favorites), cars (“sporty”), and politics (“both voted the same way in the last presidential election”). They’d never had a fight. “Maybe minor disagreements, but voices weren’t raised.” 

But they were also eager to clarify that technology didn’t deserve all the credit for their relationship. “Because we’re alike, we would get along well together. But marriage certainly requires a lot more.” In fact, they were skeptical about computer dating as a trend: “Nothing will ever come of it,” they said. 

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DIY “computer”

The Christmas when I was 6 or 7, I wrote Santa asking for a “big computer with lots of games.” I forget what I got that year, but it definitely wasn’t a computer. So I made my own, out of a cardboard box.

This 1970 article profiles two boys, John and David, who did the same thing. A key difference, though: I grew up with relatively small desktop computers, so I made my computer out of a shoebox. John and David, who would have known cabinet-sized minicomputers, went big: They used a motorcycle box. It was covered in aluminum foil and featured “a barbecue pit motor rigged inside” to give off “the put-put sound” and a flashlight for “lighting effects.”

The boys took turns inside the box, playing the part of the machine. “We’ve been doing a lot of studying, history and everything so that we can answer the questions asked the computer as best we can,” said John. “However, if we don’t know an answer we try to bluff our way out of it. Sometimes, if we don’t know the answer, we’ll say ‘maybe’ or something like that.” 

In 1970, Data General Corporation, a minicomputer manufacturer, ran a contest challenging children to make art about the computer. What started as a promotional stunt became something akin to an anthropological experiment, capturing the perspective of the first generation of “true inhabitants” of the “electronic space.”

Data General received 600 entries from kids in 5 countries. Several young artists submitted explanatory texts with their pieces. Like Julie (age 8): “The computer is… a pussycat.” 

Some other gems:

• “Wayne Middleton, Sudbury: Power in a computer is similar to the method of eating good foods to strengthen our bodies.” 

• “Kimberley Williams, 8, Wayland: Dear people, I love computers. I also love people that make computers. […] I think it is amazing how you make them.” 

• “Wendy Marie Gerbands, 3, Bedford: The blob in the left-hand corner is the moon—so she says. (From Wendy’s mother.)”

One little boy struck a more ominous tone: “Plans are sure falling apart.” But my personal favorite is this: “What I have made is what I think is inside the computer. There are little men who jump on the switches when you press the keys.”

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Girls day, boys day

In the 1980s, the number of women studying computer science began to decline, which was strange because the phenomenon was specific to computer science. Other STEM fields, like physical sciences and medicine, saw an uptick in female students. But in computer science, the trend line swerved downwards: 

Researchers today believe the decline was caused by a change in culture. The computer-savvy protagonists of 1980s movies like War Games and Revenge of the Nerds were always male, and ads for personal computers showed little boys huddled around a monitor. Computers, the media was saying, were the playthings of boys.

In 1982, a middle school in Lebanon, Oregon, became a microcosm of this phenomenon. During free period, boys were swarming to the computers while girls stayed away. “Somewhere between leaving first grade and entering middle school level, girls start seeing computers as part of ‘the man’s world,’” the article reported.

Unhappy with the “boy-girl probelm with computers,” educator Jackie Boss set up an alternating schedule with “boys days” and “girls days” so each group could have dedicated time with the machines. At first, the girls were hesitant. “I was just shocked that the girls didn’t get in and push,” Boss said. But slowly, more and more girls began using the computers, even joining an after-school club called “The Order of the Apple.” (Because they used computers from Apple. Get it? Get it?)

Speech recognition

For about as long as we’ve been making computers, we’ve been trying to talk to them.

And, well, mostly failing.

The following quote will sound familiar to anyone who has talked to the robot at the other end of the Delta Airlines customer-service line, or who has attempted to use voice to set a timer on their phone only to find themselves fumbling to hang up a call before their ex picked up: “Despite limited success in getting computers to understand words and commands, many researchers concede that no one has a clue about how to get machines to understand general conversation.”

Computer art

This week in 1968, Don Mittleman, director of Notre Dame’s computer center, unveiled a series of oil paintings created with a UNIVAC 1107 computer.  

NFTs, hallucinating neural networks, that one time that Thomas Middleditch from Silicon Valley acted in a movie written by an AI program called Benjamin... For as long as we’ve been drawing pictures or making music with machines, we’ve been asking ourselves the same thing: “But is it art?” 

The question betrays a certain nervousness about machines encroaching into what we perceive as a quintessentially human activity. We get possessive. Art is ours. Only we can be creative.

Which is… correct! Yes! Of course! Computers aren’t creative; the humans who program them are. We confuse the act of holding a paintbrush with the idea of “being creative,” so when the brush is held by a plotter connected to a computer, we worry that the creativity belongs to the machine. That’s just not true. The 1968 article that reported on Mittleman’s paintings also interviewed the head of the art department at Notre Dame, who compared the role of a programmer to that of an architect: “The fact that the architect produces blue-prints rather than the building itself does not diminish his creative role.” Well put, Mr. Head of Art Department.

Technology is a tool. It can do nothing of its own accord. Even the most sophisticated movie-script-writing neural network has a human behind it. And if you believe that, then “the computer meets the first essential of art, in that it can serve as a medium for human expression,” as the article put it.

Tic-tac-toe

In 1961, a computer hobbyist created a computer that played tic-tac-toe. It was unbeatable, if also slow: each move took the machine “five to 20 minutes.”

We humans are funny. Consider our repeated attempts to create machines that can beat us at games. Chess, Go, arcade games, Starcraft—over and over, we’ve tried our darned hardest to engineer our own defeat. 

There are two ways to look at this. The first is that we, as a species, are quite literally self-defeating. (I don’t like that one.) The second is that games, with their rigid rules and limited scope, are one of the few environments where computers can come anywhere close to approximating human proficiency. Sure, there are more possible moves in chess than there are atoms in the universe, but the game is still constrained—the board is an 8x8 grid—and predictable—you make a move, I make a move; the bishop only travels diagonally, etc. These constraints make it a workable environment for a computer.

The real world is infinitely more complex, and humans are infinitely better at handling it. Do you know how I know that? Because here is what happens when a computer encounters an unpredictable environment.

Computer music

The 1980s were a boon for computer music. New hardware let composers do things they couldn’t before: “The latest program being used at MIT allows the composer to change the tempo of a piece by waving a light pen at the screen, much like a conductor leads an orchestra with a baton.” 

Some musicians liked computers for their accuracy: “I wrote music for years and never heard a note of it performed properly,” said one. Others felt the machines’ style was sterile, and they adjusted accordingly: “I can program in random deviations, even inaccuracies, that make the sound better. Perfectly produced compositions just don’t sound good.”

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Computers on TV

Popular culture tends to reflect the times. So it made sense that in the sixties, TV shows began featuring computers as characters.

Sometimes, the computers were villains. In The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a malevolent machine ruled over an organization called T.H.R.U.S.H. (which stood, aptly, for “Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity”). 

Other times, they were protagonists, like the titular character in a show called (and I’m not making this up) My Living Doll. Per Wikipedia, the series followed “a psychiatrist who is given care of Rhoda Miller, a lifelike android (played by Julie Newmar) in the form of a sexy, Amazonian female, by her creator, a scientist who did not want her to fall into the hands of the military.” (Again: Not making this up.)

While The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ran for four years and was eventually repurposed in a 2015 film, My Living Doll was canceled after one season. Shocking.

This week in 1969, a computer-dating company called Compatibility took out a full-page ad trying to persuade singles to “be comfortable with computer dating.”

Compatibility served photos of potential suitors to clients, who could swipe to the left or right to indicate their interest. A mutual right-swipe constituted a “match” and unlocked the ability to carry on a conversation via text entry. 

Just kidding! That’s not how Compatibility worked! What do you think relationships are? A game?

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A woman in tech

This week in 1970: “They don’t realize that a computer is just a high-grade moron that does what you tell it to.”

That was Penny Kaniclides, a computer executive, on why some women tended to “fear” digital technology. “I’d like to see more women alerted to the possibility of a career in computer technology,” she said.

To the best of Kaniclides’ knowledge, she was “the first woman president of a computer company.” She founded her firm, Telstat Systems, after rising through the ranks at Standard & Poor’s, where she went from programmer to the company’s first female vice president. “In that capacity, Penny supervised 85 persons, all males.” 

What was her experience like as a woman in tech? “Perhaps because this is such a comparatively new field, I encountered very little, if any, discrimination because I am a woman,” she said. (Now might be a good time to note that the profile begins by remarking on her appearance and ends with her marital prospects, and the headline attempts a pun about her figure. But, you know, 1970.)

Shopping

This week in 1977: Consider the barcode. It’s so ubiquitous now that it can be hard to imagine it was ever novel. But once upon a time, the barcode was “a mystifying block of bars and spaces with a 10-digit number underneath.” 

Mystifying!

Computer at HBCU

This week in 1966: Lincoln University, a HBCU in Missouri, debuted an IBM 1620 computer, “one of the most fascinating educational and research tools” at the school. 

“Educational,” sure, but also just fun: “The versatility of the equipment was demonstrated not long ago when a ‘mate selection’ program was conceived and executed. Students were sent questionnaires and asked to list such things as their hobbies, tastes, personal habits, and ambitions. The computer was used to compare characteristics of the men and women students, and on this basis was able to ‘select a mate for each student.’”

Among the computer’s other talents: drawing, writing, and playing blackjack.

Propaganda

This week in 1971, news of a state computer network under development in the Soviet Union combined two bête noirs of nineteen-seventies America: computerization and communism.

“Already there is talk of a cable television system which could, with the aid of computers, switch into each home the kind of advertising message to which the particular recipient would be more likely to respond.” 

Hmmm. Russia using computers to serve tendentious hyper-targeted “news” to sway people… why does that sound familiar?

Playing God

This week in 1979: “These things are fantastic, you can do almost anything with them,” said one member of the Vermont Computer Guild at their weekly meeting. He had programmed a computer to “specify the day of the week for every date since 1752.” Another guild member was showcasing a game called “Life,” a proto-Civilization where “213 generations of people” could “live and die in a matter of minutes.” And a third had rigged a synthesizer to play Bach (“he doesn’t play keyboard himself—he lets the computer do it”). 

“It’s just like God,” said one of the guild members. “You set it (the computer program) up and wait to see what happens, and laugh at your own private universe.”

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Chinese printer

This week in 1972: Graphtek, a firm in Arizona, developed a printer capable of generating Chinese characters from a dot matrix. This may not sound like a big deal, but think about this: the software you’re using to read this newsletter was most likely written in a programming language that uses the Latin alphabet.

And it’s not just your browser or email client. All of the most widely used programming languages were constructed with literal ABCs. Exceptions exist, but they’re, well, exceptions. The Latin alphabet has been the default character set for tech development since the ENIAC in the 1940s.

China is a hotbed of tech development today, but its entry into the digital revolution was delayed for one very basic reason: The tens of thousands of characters in the Chinese language were simply not accounted for in early software and hardware. (RadioLab has a great episode on one man’s decades-long effort to create a Chinese-language keyboard.) 

The idea for the Graphtek Chinese printer came from a client in Taiwan, an insurance company that needed to quickly generate monthly reports with their policyholders’ information.

“Up to now, English has been the language for computers,” said the engineer responsible for the project. “With the Graphtek system, any language can be used, solving a critical computer age problem for the Orient.” 

This week in 1963: the AP reported on two very important questions about the space program: what would astronauts eat, and how would they shave?

The first American spaceflight, in 1961, lasted just 15 minutes. Now, NASA had its sights set on the moon, which would require longer missions, which would require food—and, apparently, a way to groom.

Whirlpool, the appliances giant, created “a shaver operated by a spring motor, like a windup toy train. It has a built-in vacuum cleaner that collects the cut whiskers—which otherwise might float around getting into eyes and noses or fouling instruments.”

For food, Whirlpool came up with a menu of dehydrated, just-add-water, ACME-style delicacies. During a demo, a Whirlpool manager “popped open a sack of shrimp, poured in two ounces of water, and 10 minutes later there were nice moist shrimp that tasted just like shrimp.”

Coincidentally, 10 minutes was also the duration of Bezos’ space jaunt last week. Barely enough for some rehydrated shrimp.

Gaming for girls

This week in 1983: Behold Jenny of the Prairie, a video game whose protagonist was (gasp!) a girl. 

“Pac Man fever […] is largely a male disease. Dodging spaceships is a yawn to many little girls,” said the game’s creators, software designer Lucy Werth Ewell and psychologist Elizabeth R. Stott. (Also largely a male disease: creating toxic work environments in the gaming industry.)

The women founded their studio, Rhiannon, to make computers more accessible to girls. “Sexual stereotypes and societal pressures discourage girls from embracing the computer revolution, even though they have the same aptitudes for computers,” Stott said in a 1985 report from the AP. “We believe girls ought to have an equal crack at careers. We didn’t want them to get tuned out before they were 10 years old.”

Sounds like an idea worth investing in, right? What might possibly prevent them from securing funding?

Ah, right. Sexism.

“When the women looked for money to start the business, banks agreed to lend it only if their husbands co-signed the loan. When they borrowed again to expand, Ms. Stott had to turn to her father as a guarantor,” said the AP report.

Jenny was part of a series that also included Chelsea of the South Sea Islands, Cave Girl Clair, and Lauren of the 25th Century. They were survival games. In Jenny, players had to chop wood, pick apples, hunt rabbits, and avoid mountain lions and rattlesnakes to keep the main character alive. It was, it seems, a good game. So much so that during play tests, a little boy asked Ewell and Stott to design a “similar game,” but with “a boy hero.”

“Why should we do a game for boys when they have all the games on the market now?” Stott said. “Actually, we’re concerned about the WASPiness of the characters more than the fact that they’re all girls.”

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Burgers

This week in 1973, the digital revolution arrived at Burger King via computerized cash registers that could tally order totals, calculate sales taxes, and keep track of inventory.

People who think about technology often envision an ideal state of human-computer cooperation, where humans offload mindless tasks to machines so they can focus on things only people can do.

Burger King had the same idea: by automating rote tasks, the new cash registers would free up workers to “return to the ‘old ways’ of friendly, face-to-face merchandising.”

That vision of fast-food service will sound impossibly quaint to anyone who’s visited a drive-thru in the last 25 years. But for a while in 1973, it seemed to work: “The queues [...] are moving faster than ever, but the store supervisors are actually slowing down enough to chat with customers.”

Obsolescence

This week in 1968: The dean of USC’s School of Engineering proclaimed humans wouldn’t be obsolete until at least 2050.

Neat!

The dean’s point, though, was more sophisticated than simply “we are doomed.” He painted two scenarios for our obsolescence. In one, machines would declare war on humans, and they’d win. (Then, we’d spend existence as organic batteries with our consciousness suspended in a simulation until The One freed us. Obviously.)

But in the other version of the future, humanity would offload all labor and industry to machines, leading to a future presumably financed by universal basic income.

“It is predictable that when one man meets another in the coming centuries and says ‘what do you do?’ he won’t be asking what the individual does for a living, because no one will be working for a living. He’ll get answers such as ‘I’m a mountain climber,’ or ‘I paint,’ or ‘I’m a musician.’”

Maybe obsolescence isn’t so bad?

Card-playing robot

This week in 1963, the world’s best bridge players gathered for the 35th national championship. For the first time ever, dealing and scoring would be done by a computer.

But the Honeywell manager who installed the system also saw potential in having it compete. “By next year I think we can have it outperforming 90 percent of tournament players,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” countered the tournament director. “I saw the computer broken down for three hours the other day, and I will have to admit I felt a little triumphant. I felt more human, somehow.”

Compu-tots

This week in 1982: A delightful infographic explained computers to kids (or, as the piece calls them, “compu-tots”). 

“Computers are very helpful. They can do many things without ever becoming tired, hungry or bored.”

This week: China allegedly hacked lots of stuff. (Their position: No, we didn’t. You did. Which, I mean...)

This week in 1973: The Morning News opinion page described “a science fiction fantasy” where a “programmer” infects computers with a “virus,” holding the system hostage until the owner pays a “fee.”

Right. “Fantasy.”

Synthetic Speech

This week: A documentary about Anthony Bourdain used AI to synthesize the late chef’s voice, prompting a wave of takes about the ethics of deepfakes.

This week in 1961: two researchers demo-ed a synthetic speech technique at a conference. Their machine recited Hamlet, which was a perhaps a bit on-the-nose: “Of course, as far as the computer was concerned, to be or not to be alive was the question.”

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Robot Therapists

This week: Kara Swisher interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Talkspace. They agreed that computers are never going to replace humans as therapists.

This week in 1976: A researcher at the University of Washington unveiled a sex-therapy program. “Our goal is to eliminate the therapist,” he said.

Privacy

This week: Privacy, ya know?

This week in 1975: A columnist for the Bloomington Pantagraph warned about the government’s ability “to construct instant dossiers” on “anyone who has ever paid taxes, used a credit card, driven a car, served in the military, or been arrested.”

“Too much efficiency scares me.”

Same, columnist. Same.

Matchmaking

This week in 1968: Well before Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid, and Match.com, humans were using computers to find a significant other. So much so that human-ness became a selling point for flesh-and-blood matchmakers. Clara Lane, who bought this ad, needed no help from machines. By the time she passed in 1985, she claimed to have matched over 25,000 couples.

What is this?

We Are Living in the Future collects the week’s tech news, from history.

The story we most often hear about tech goes something like this: In the beginning, computers were impossibly big and cumbersome machines, which lay beyond the reach of us poor mortal masses. Then, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs delivered us digital salvation.

But well before Bill and Steve—before Mark, Jeff, Elon, Sergey, the Larrys and all the other Great Men of Tech—people were experimenting with computers. They were using computers to learn, conduct business, make art, play games, commit crimes, stop crime, advance science, go through therapy, cook, compose music, and, of course, date.

This newsletter curates news articles from the corresponding week in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sometimes, the articles relate to current events, and they seem eerily prescient. Other times, they’re just funny.

Beware: this is not a comprehensive or rigorous “people’s history of technology.” (For that, check out Joy Lisi Rankin’s aptly titled People’s History of Computing in the United States.) The goal here is to entertain—and maybe, occasionally, to hold up a mirror you can look into across time.

We are, literally, living in the future.

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