http://tech.msn.com/news/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3532350>1=9132You're a pioneer both for women and computer scientists. What advice do you give now that you wish you had taken when you started your career?
Allen: Not to get so frustrated sometimes when you can't get your way.
You know, it was a wonderful time in those early days because "computer science" didn't exist yet. There weren't a lot of constraints on thinking, on what you could try to do. So it was kind of free, a period of trying many different things. Now there's much more knowledge about what doesn't work, or presumed knowledge about what doesn't work, and you have to know more. And it was a time when one could (experiment broadly). It was like a fresh wall that you could paint.
You joined IBM to teach Ptran in 1957. How has the environment changed for women since you started your career?
Allen: At that time in the environment that I was in at IBM Research in Poughkeepsie, there were many women that were being hired. Actually, quite a few of them came from Vassar and in that neighborhood. IBM had put out, I've discovered years later, a brochure called "My Fair Ladies" and they were actively recruiting women. Of course, they were actively recruiting a lot of people. There weren't any set requirements that they had to meet. They were just looking for people that had interesting backgrounds.
As a female in a male-dominated profession, were there any "ouch" moments that you can recall over the course of your career?
Allen: Oh boy! Well, yeah! The thing is, you know, in the '60s things got pretty bleak for women.
Why is that?
Allen: Well, it became a profession in the '60s. Computer science became a science and it became much more structured to people that were being hired, and there were mostly men that met the requirements. It significantly changed the workplace.
Now, the "ouch" moment. Well, here's one that I haven't told any other reporter. I was working on a software program, on a very large machine which was being built in a huge warehouse on an IBM site. It was a mammoth machine! The first time I went to go and run my program on the machine that was being built, I went with a group of the guys, and as we walked into the building we were suddenly stopped. And they said, "Whoops, we don't know how to get to the machine without going through the men's room." The floor where the computer was had been built so that this kind of huge men's room was down the middle, because there were so many people involved with putting these things together.
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Not to be confused with the Turing Prize in which one trys to prove a machine can think, we already knew a Woman could think , ........
