Not only did Al Gore invent the internet, the wise Latina discovered how to use a word-processor for senior theses.

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Madame's Nightshirt
Mrs. Peperium

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor at Princeton, circa 1972.

 

From this week's Princeton Alumni Weekly:

 

I very much enjoyed reading my classmate Sonia Sotomayor’s account of her Princeton experience in her book, My Beloved World, and found much that I could relate to as another daughter of immigrants from modest circumstances. I did, however, have to chuckle at her immodest claim of having been the first to discover how to use a computer to word-process her senior thesis. By the spring of 1976 a goodly number of seniors, myself included, were making use of the computers at the EQuad to produce our theses. It required no computer knowledge, which I certainly did not have; in fact, the only skills needed were the ability to type on the keyboard of a computer monitor and to handle a box of punch cards.

[Name Withheld] ’76

Newton, Mass.

 

 

 

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From Sotomayor's My Beloved World, pages 133-2:

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Part of my financial aid package committed me to weekly hours in the work study program. At the start of freshman year, I was assigned to food service at the commons, but a lingering case of mononucleosis took me off the cafeteria line. I needed a desk job where I couldn't cause an epidemic. I was eager too, to explore something new. The food service job was standard student fare in a predictable environment. But when I saw a posting for a keypunch operator at the Computer Center I was intrigued.

Computers were a brave new world when I started work there in 1972 and access to their powers was confined to cavernous campus centers. Judith Rowe, head of the center's social sciences division, was a pioneer; among the first to envision the potential of quantitative analysis in the social sciences, she saw that computers would be the key to realizing it. To advance that vision she encouraged graduate students to use computers to analyze their research data, an effort she facilitated by hiring work-study students like me to do the data entry. One project I worked on was with the historian Vernon Burton, who had discovered a treasure trove of old census records near his hometown in South Carolina. (There is such serendipity in historical research: Vernon had stopped on a back road to buy a soda when he spotted the stack of ledgers holding up a shelf; he offered to build some proper shelves for the shopkeeper in return for the ledgers.) My job was to key all the census data onto punch cards and help Vernon run the analysis.

I had taken a typing course in high school, figuring I could always get a job that way, if necessary. That was qualification enough to start, as no one beyond the programmers themselves, had any computer skills. Under Judith's guidance I learned a bit about programming and became skilled at keypunching. Because the work was specialized, I earned double what I had been making in the cafeteria. There were other perks too, we could set our own hours and come in a we were; in jeans and T-shirts. It was a student's dream job, and I kept it all 4 years at Princeton, working there 10 or 15 hours a week on top of the other jobs that came and went.

The mainframe of the computer gave off so much heat, its room was cooled to frigid temperatures, and I wore a jacket and gloves whenever I went down to into the basement to feed my stack of punch cards into the machine. If the program crashed, I had to inspect each card individually to find the error. Often that meant perusing hundreds or even thousands of punchcards for a single mistaken keystroke, a maddening effort. Next to the monitor that showed the jobs queuing to run on the computer was a metal post that seemed to serve no purpose. It was a while before someone explained it to me; after repeatedly replastering the wall, the administration had decided to install the post for the convenience of frustrated students, who invariably needed something to kick when their code crashed.

Later, in my senior year, I was taking a break from writing my thesis to catch up on a couple of hours of keypunch work when an idea occurred to me: Why not enter the text of my thesis on the same type of punch cards that we were using for data analysis? That way, I could make changes as needed to individual cards without having to retype all the subsequent pages. Judith was intrigued. She thought it a worthwhile experiment, and she assigned another operator to do the data entry for me. It's hard to be certain, but I might have submitted the first word-processed senior thesis in Princeton's history, and I didn't even have to type it myself.

 

Related reading :

"There’s something weird about the need to tell quite so many unnecessary fictions."

--Mark Steyn's No One left to Lie To.

 

 

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