First Computer

In 1970 I got a job with the legal publishing company Bancroft-Whitney typing case summaries dictated by attorneys. In a large light-filled room on an upper floor of a brick building south of Market in San Francisco, eight of us did this work day after day. (In truth, work was secondary to the lively cultural traffic in the office! Probably no different than it is today.) In the corner was a large computer terminal, which came to life when a computer at the home office in Rochester, New York, called it through a WATS line. When the beautiful girl who ran this behemoth quit, I got the job.

The point of this particular dictation was to composite indexes. Thus, an attorney could cite subjects of a case, dictate a page number and the computer in Rochester compiled the page numbers into a list, an index at the back of a book. This exacting work was done by only one attorney as the subjects must take a particular form. The job introduced me to the life many of us now have, in that we are at the mercy of the internet! (“You were doing cloud computing back in 1970,” says Don.)

It was frustrating to wait for the call which was supposed to happen each day at the same time. It didn’t always. Often one end or the other would lose communication, dropping the line. I had to figure out what had gotten saved and what hadn’t and how much work to re-do! I would be fuming in my corner, trying not to disturb others who were humming along at their work. The terminal used pin-fed green-and-white-lined paper. Due to deadlines, I sometimes worked Saturday mornings, though I took off another day of the week to make sure I was only working 40 hours.

Computers played a big part in my work life from then on. I typed and retyped manuscript on mag cards, cassette tapes (frustrating because when the writer added a paragraph, you had to go in and reformat a lot of data when it was stored in a limited, linear fashion!) and finally random access floppy disks. I ran Fortran programs written by the crack programmer Pat Schilling whenever she wanted to accomplish something. I was even part owner of a company which introduced computing to architects, the unique Design Logic, which contracted computer-aided drafting among other services.

Discovering databases was something of a watershed for me. Before relational databases came in, I could cause quite a bit of structure, slicing, dicing and reporting on data using dBaseIII and IV. (I made up databases for the characters in the novel I was working on as well!) Ditto for spreadsheets. For a while I worked at one of the early computer help desks, aptly called Computer Hand Holding.

Without a clear career path or even a desire for one, this becomes Marty’s experience. In her artistic life, she journals and takes still photographs. In the full flush of her new intellectual freedom, she doesn’t want to write for a living or get into the technical demands of professional photography. She gets better and better work in offices as her computer skills increase. But it isn’t without hazard or frustration, as most of us now know!