Where Coders Code

**Yohan Philippine** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Yohan Philippine, and I've got a hot take. One of the best things to come out of these last few eventful years is remote access to events. Red Hat Summit created an entire virtual content hub this year, so you can catch the highlights from the May event on your schedule without leaving your couch. For keynotes, technical sessions, and a whole lot more, register at no cost at red.ht forward slash on-demand. That's on-demand one word.
See you there.

**Saron Yitbarek** (0:37)
Hello. Welcome to Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. This is episode two of our special mini season, all about the work life of coders, from developers to sysadmins to architects to engineers to programmers.
I'm your host, Saron Yitbarek. And joining me for the run of this season is Clive Thompson, journalist, technology writer, and author of the book Coders. Hi, Clive.

**Clive Thompson** (1:05)
Hi, Saron. Good to be back.

**Saron Yitbarek** (1:06)
Thanks for joining us, Clive.
In this episode, let's talk about something a large number of us, not just tech workers, are very familiar with by now. Because most of us have had to do it since March of 2020, remote work. Now, you might think that remote work in our industry is a relatively recent phenomenon. As technology has improved, the easier it's gotten to work from home. Think again. Let's listen to this developer's story.

**Mary Allen Wilkes** (1:35)
Well, my name is Mary Allen Wilkes. I was a computer programmer for approximately 12 or 13 years, between 1959 and 1972

**Saron Yitbarek** (1:49)
Mary Allen is 82 years old. When she was a teenager, she fell in love with law and wanted to be a lawyer. But back in the 50s, that wasn't a wise career choice for a woman. Mentors discouraged her and told her it would be too much of an uphill climb.
By chance, one of her teachers pictured another route for her.

**Mary Allen Wilkes** (2:11)
I had been told when I was in the eighth grade by a geography teacher in class one day, apparently I was giving him some kind of argument about something.
And he just stopped and he looked at me and he said, Mary Allen, when you grow up, you ought to be a computer programmer. Well, I had no idea what he was talking about. Years later, I wondered how he knew what he was talking about. He taught geography and French. Nobody taught computer programming, but I never forgot what he said. And I think one of the reasons that stuck with me for so many years was that it was something positive that an adult told me I could do when I grew up.

**Saron Yitbarek** (2:57)
When Mary Allen finished college and started applying for jobs, the only place that had a job for a computer programmer was at MIT. Nobody had any training in computer programming.
Her main qualification was two logic courses she'd taken in college. But that was more than her MIT colleagues had.

**Mary Allen Wilkes** (3:16)
I started off at Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, a big MIT research facility that is funded by the Department of Defense. We're talking 1959
And I first learned they were using these big behemoth computers, the ones that occupied a whole room. And that's what I first learned to program. They were IBM computers. You wrote your programs out line by line in assembly language, and then you handed these sheets of paper to a punch card operator who punched each line of code, and you took that to the computer room, and you gave it to a computer operator.

**Saron Yitbarek** (4:04)
In 1961, Mary Allen got assigned to a group to work on the Link computer, a laboratory instrument mini computer. It was one of the first truly interactive computers, not too dissimilar to a desktop computer today.

**Mary Allen Wilkes** (4:19)
The Link had a display screen. We call it the scope because it was really just a laboratory oscilloscope. It had four boxes that you could set on a tabletop or a desktop.
And one box held this oscilloscope. One box held two little magnetic tape units that were pocket sized. That was basically your permanent storage, your hard drive, if you will. That was where you stored your programs and you read in your programs. Another box was called like a console box. You could use the switches to load some code, some bootstrapping code, for example, into the memory of the link. It also had a keyboard.
So you had the basic interactive setup that you have today with a keyboard and a screen and some means of permanent storage. And then, of course, there were all the electronics which were housed in a big box about the size of a refrigerator.