"Computing.... There I was!"

Alex Wolfson first got interested in programming in an electronic music class, where the teacher explained how computers worked. Alex said that's when he "got it!". His first job was a systems programmer, which was what today would be called a combination of DevOps and SRE. He moved on to work at a number of banks in NYC and Boston. In the nineties he worked at a startup where he was the first per...

Robert started his career in New Jersey working in pharmaceutical industry. He expected to go to work at IBM, after some internships there, but at the time of his graduation IBM was not in the greatest shape. Eventually, Robert moved to LA and on friend's advice applied to Google and was hired. Initially he worked at Google in California, but later moved back to Google New York. He recently retire...

Kevin started his career as a programmer at Rockefeller University, supporting medical research. He worked for the doctors that created the methadone treatment for heroine addicts. He then moved to Wall Street, working on financial applications first, and the on transactional infrastructure software for many banks around the world. As result he became an accidental inside witness reaction t world...

One story summarizes Adam's career - when he was asked in an intro to engineering class "Why do you want to be an electrical engineer?", he replied "Because it's fun!". While he started as an electrical engineer, he quickly moved into programing of the devices he worked on. As a requirement for a job he read the classic "C Language" book over a weekend to learn C. Eventually he landed at Google, w...

Steven Fortune began programming while still in High School - in FORTRAN on punch cards. One of his ambitious projects was a program to play chess (in batch mode!). After obtaining his Ph. D., he went to work at IBM Research Labs in Yorktown Heights. Later, he moved on to Bell Labs research, where he worked in the group that included the creators of UNIX. While working on graph algorithms he devel...

David Windmueller had an unusually varied career. Although he started playing with computers in elementary school, he started his working life as operator of nuclear reactors in the US Navy. Once he became a software engineer he worked at NASA, some startups and eventually landed at Google. Today he teaches computer science and physics to high school students. If you have any questions or suggesti...

John Cordell had an impressive career. As a teenager he worked along engineers who designed early micro processors at Datapoint . After a stint in NY finance sector, John landed at Microsoft where he was one of the initial developers of the first Internet Explorer. He is responsible for the IFRAME tag in HTML. He also worked at several startups, including an early AI one. If you have any questions...

Barbara Gilman started her career as a Systems Engineer at IBM in 1962. She first wired control panels on IBM accounting machines, such as the 407 , then moved on to programming 1401 computers. She first coded in machine language, then used Autocoder and others, including Assembly language on the IBM 360/370. After leaving IBM, Barbara worked as an independent software developer, working on many s...

Kitty started her career as a system programmer at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), working on the MUMPS system, then worked at number of financial institutions and eventually ran her own web design business (see https://www.openskywebdesign.com). While doing all that she was also a world class bridge player and genealogist. You can visit her web site: http://kittycooper.com/ If you have any question...

Marc Cohen is a software engineer who worked for many years at Google, Bell Labs and Lucent. He left Google in 2024 and now is a part time teacher in London - teaching Python and AI. Marc writes a regular blog, which you can fine here: https://mco.dev/ . For future software engineers Marc gave a talk on how to handle a technical interview, as he was an interviewer at Google. Check it out: Tech Int...

As mentioned in the episode, David learned to program as a teenager on a Olivetti programable calculator. Take a look at this page to see what it looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101 If you have any questions or suggestions please email the host: richieb@gmail.com

This is the first episode of "Computing... There I was". It's a conversation Eric Mintz, a software engineer recently retired from Google. Turns out Eric made a small mistake, the language he first programmed in was called CORC - Cornell Computing Language. For those that would like see what keypunch looked and sounded like check out this video . Finally, any questions or suggestions pleas email m...

This is a short introduction to the podcast by your host. You can always write me at richieb@gmail.com. Please include "Computing...There I was" in the subject line.