My Mom Was on the Cutting Edge of the Computer Age

Last week, I wrote about how my dad came to Tucson as a teen. Today, I want to focus on my mom’s story. She came to Tucson with her family because of her father’s work as a geologist. She and Dad both attended and graduated from Tucson High School, but there were almost five thousand students on the campus, so they never met (although she did hear from classmates about “the McArthur twins”).

Mom studied public administration at the University of Arizona, with an emphasis on foreign service. This meant she was in the business school. In fact, she took the first computer programming class ever offered at the U of A. She worked in the registrar’s office, which had an early computational sorting machine. A professor would say there were 30 slots in their class, and she’d give them 30 punch cards with the class information punched in. Students who wanted to enroll in the class would be given one of those cards, which they took to the registrar’s office to fill in with their names.

The sorting machine was not programmable in today’s sense. She would connect wires through certain holes in a grid to have the machine perform certain tasks such as class lists and GPA reports (printed on that pin-fed, green-bar, continuous-feed computer paper—which even I remember using!). She would connect the wires differently to get the machine to perform different tasks. Cutting edge for the time!

When Dad began his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Mom had no trouble getting a job at the university because she knew how to work with computer punch cards. At one point, she worked alongside someone who was inputting surveys from students involved in a research project. It turned out that one of the students they’d lost touch with was my father! What a small world.

What cutting-edge technology or new invention were you among the first to use? What small-world stories do you have to tell?