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 suggestions please email the host: [email protected]

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.

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 small and mid-range systems, from PCs to 1440s to AS400s, for a wide range of companies. She ended her career working for The Coca-Cola Company.

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/

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 Interviews: What to Expect Tips and Tricks

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

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 me at [email protected] with subject "Computing... There I Was".

This is a short introduction to the podcast by your host. You can always write me at [email protected]. Please include "Computing...There I was" in the subject line.