Celebrating history’s innovators
We use each intake of students to celebrate different personalities from the world of technology. Each new cohort takes the name of someone whose innovations and positively influenced our everyday lives through their innovation. We’re not about showcasing the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of history; instead, we want to highlight those stories you may not have heard, and those individuals who history may have overlooked.
With this cohort, we celebrate the life of Mary Allen Wilkes, who helped build the first at-home computer – and catalyse the work from home revolution we’ve seen in the past couple of years.
Who was Mary Allen Wilkes?
“Mary Allen, when you grow up, you should be a computer programmer!”
As a teenager in Maryland in the 1950s, Mary Allen Wilkes had no plans to become a software pioneer. At that time, computing was very new – the first digital computers had been built barely a decade earlier at universities and in government labs – and few people even knew what a computer programmer was. Instead, Wilkes dreamed of being a litigator.
But, one day in junior high in 1950, her geography teacher gave her the advice quoted above – advice all too rare for anyone in Americans at that time, and especially women. And, at a time when women would be more likely to be a law librarian or legal secretary than to argue a case in front of a judge, her choice to follow her geography teacher’s advice opened opportunities that her legal ambitions may have left out of reach.
Starting her coding journey
In college, she heard that computers were the key to the future. She knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) had a few of them. So, once she’d graduated, she asked her parents to drive her to M.I.T., where she inquired about programming jobs and was hired.
At the time, there was no such thing as a computer science degree, and very few people knew how to write code. Instead, institutions that needed programmers used aptitude tests to evaluate applicants’ ability to think logically – not unlike the psychometric tests we use at futureproof. Wilkes’ philosophy degree just happened to give her the right preparation: she had studied symbolic logic, which can involve creating arguments and inferences by stringing together and/or statements in a way that resembles coding.
Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist, who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader.
While at M.I.T., she began writing in an “assembly language” on the IBM704, a punch card computer. Progress was painfully slow: even getting the program into the IBM 704 was a laborious affair. Wilkes had to write a program on paper and give it to a typist,who translated each command into holes on a punch card. She would carry boxes of commands to an “operator,” who then fed a stack of such cards into a reader. The computer executed the program and produced results, typed out on a printer.
Debugging her code was just as time-consuming. Wilkes had to scrutinise the code trying to spot her mistake, and envisioning how the machine would execute each line of code — effectively turning her mind into the computer, rewriting the program.
Building the first personal computer
In 1961, Wilkes was assigned to the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC) project. The LINC was specifically intended for use by individuals, in contrast to a giant time sharing computer. This breakthrough machine would feasibly fit in a single office or lab. It would even have its own keyboard and screen, so it could be programmed more quickly, without awkward punch cards or printouts. As such, the LINC is often described as the world’s first ‘personal computer.’
The LINC’s designers could make the hardware, but needed Wilkes to help write the software that would let a user control the computer in real time. Wilkes spent two and a half years with her team toiling over flowcharts, pondering how the circuitry functioned, and how to let people communicate with it.
When the team relocated the lab to St Louis, Wilkes had no desire to move there to finish writing the LINC’s operating system. Instead, a LINC was shipped to her parents’ house in Baltimore – and, as a result, Wilkes became one of the first people in the world to have a personal computer (PC) in her home. It was a far cry from today’s lightweight, portable machines. Wilkes’ PC was a tall cabinet of whirring magnetic tapes across from a refrigerator-size box full of circuitry. Nevertheless, this machine looming large at the bottom of her parents staircase was a glimpse into the computing future we’re accustomed to today. Soon, LINC users around the world were using her code to program medical analyses and even create a chatbot that interviewed patients about their symptoms.
Women in the tech workforce
Today, when Wilkes gives talks to young students studying computer science, they are shocked to hear how women represented a far more significant part of the industry in the 1960s than today.
In 1960, when she started working at M.I.T., the proportion of women in computing and mathematical professions was 27 percent, and reached 35 percent in 1990. But that was the peak and, by 2013, women were down to 26 percent – below their share 50 years previously.
By aiming for 50:50 gender parity across our student cohorts, this is a trend that the Academy is actively looking to address to help discover the Mary Allen Wilkes of the future.