In 1968 a computer was an extremely large machine. There was also large peripheral equipment that went along with it. Each of the tape drives, of that time, was larger than a refrigerator and each individual computer had several tape drives. This equipment was housed in a dedicated “computer room”. Most rooms, of this type, were at least 30 feet by 30 feet or larger. The computer room was static-free and climate-controlled. It was behind locked doors with access given only to authorized personnel.

As a programmer I had access to the computer room, but under normal circumstances was not allowed to operate the computer. That was the job of the white lab-coated computer operator. The computers, of that era, were so expensive that getting time to test your programs was often a chore. The computers ran 24 hours a day and generally every hour was filled with production jobs and testing. Often I would get a phone call in the middle of the night saying that some program had crashed and I could have access to the computer for an hour or two. Even if it was 2am, I would jump at the chance to get computer time. These night-time forays were the only time when the rules were a little flexible and I could sometimes run the computer myself, which was a real thrill.

This was a time when programs were written on sheets of grid paper that were sent to the key punch operators to be transferred to punch cards. Any company with a mainframe computer needed a large staff of keypunch operators to support it. The punch cards were labeled with the programmer’s name and put into heavy cardboard boxes that were about two feet long. I’ll never forget the day that an office prankster scared me and I dropped my box of cards. I spent the rest of the afternoon getting those punch cards back in the correct order so they could be fed into the computer in the proper sequence.

That prankster thought he was really funny since I was the only female programmer at that time. Things were different in those days.. At that time the keypunch operators were all women and the computer programmers and operators were mainly men. As a woman programmer, I was a rarity and sometimes I was on the receiving end of jokes and pranks. Luckily, most were good-natured and I accepted them as a way to put a little levity into an otherwise tedious job.

The work that we did back then was especially difficult. Not only were we converting old programs to new ones, but we were also using different computer languages. Old Fortran and Assembler programs were being rewritten in the fairly new COBOL language. At that time, there was a series of Excedrin commercials on television which showed people with headaches. Each headache was revealed to have a different cause and was given a unique number. For example, the headache caused by the screaming child was labeled “Excedrin Headache #10”. The one caused by the neighbor’s loud party was “Excedrin Headache #15”, etc.

In our work area, we had a two-foot tall aspirin bottle with a sign that read “Excedrin Headache #360” and we used those little white tablets quite often.

Things sure have changed. Now, the average person has a computer on their desktop that is more powerful than those huge computers of forty years ago. Six-year-olds play games on their computers and people of all ages surf the Internet. One thing, however, hasn’t changed at all. I still have a bottle of Excedrin on my desk right next to my computer!