Anyway, before this class, I was always confident that I’d be the top student in any science or math class. A weird observation though… I wasn’t actually happy about this. I had a fantasy that some boy would beat me at some math or science thing and my plan was to fall in love with him and marry him.

However, back to the computer programming class. I walked into the class, and all the other students were talking about how they had built ham radios when they were seven. I didn’t even know what a ham radio was. They were also asking questions using scary words like “input.” I had no idea what that meant, and it felt like I was so far behind that I’d never catch up. I wound up not getting anything out of that class. This makes me a good teacher though, because I understand the sense of panic and insecurity that can prevent someone from learning.

The way I actually learned how to program was that as a sophomore at MIT I was taking a physics class and the TA said to me “I need a programmer for a project. Would you like to be my programmer?” I said “I don’t know how to program.” He said “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m asking you. You’re obviously bright, so I’m sure you can learn (I was doing very well in the class), and I have no money to pay you. If you knew how to program I’d have to pay you.” At that time, I had a boyfriend who knew how to program. So even though learning programming seemed scary to me, it would be a safe way to learn.

My first paying computer job was in 1971 as a part time programmer at the MIT AI lab, in the Logo group, writing system software like debuggers. I worked there while going to school.

Then I got inspired to design a programming language, together with special “keyboards” and other input devices, for teaching programming concepts similar to Logo, but to much younger children. This was actually a cool project…and decades later some people from the MIT Media project tracked me down and said this project started a whole field known as “tangible computing.” But at the time, I abandoned it because, being the only woman around, I wanted to be taken seriously as a “scientist” and was a little embarrassed that my project involved cute little kids.

In your studies and when you first started working in the field, did you have many female colleagues? What was the environment for a young woman like in those days?

I went to MIT at a time when the number of females was strictly limited by the number that could fit into the single female dorm, so there were very few women (I think 50 out of a class of 1000). But since I was required to live in the women’s dorm I at least knew some women. But when I was a sophomore most of the men’s dorms became “coed,” and that sounded like fun, so I moved out of the women’s dorm and into a “coed” dorm. But with so few women, “coed” pretty much meant I was the “resident female.” I didn’t really see other women in the dorm. And I majored in math, so I didn’t see them in my classes either. It became so normal to me not to see women around that I didn’t notice the gender imbalance. It was only when occasionally there was a(nother) female in a class that I’d notice that it kind of looked weird…this other gender person looking curiously out of place in the crowd. I’d have to remind myself that I was also that “other gender.”