(As a child, I got to sit on a stool at one of the high office tables and draw with the colored pencils.)
When the card piles were ready, she would take them to a different floor of the building where the massive computers were stored in a secure, windowless, VERY air conditioned environment.
3/
She would stack the cards into tall piles, use binder clips or rubber bands to hold them together, and draw on the sides of the piles with colored pencils so they could more easily be put back together in order if necessary—sometimes the piles got dropped or came undone, which was a catastrophe!
2/
By the end of her career, she was writing code to produce 3D color representations of beneath the earth’s surface from seismographic data and was known as “The Legend” in her field.
And that entire floor of computers? It had less processing power than an iPhone.
New tech, same zeros and ones.
6/6
In return, sometimes the man in the computer room would hand her a stack of large green and white striped paper that was folded and had perforations.
(The green paper gave more Wizard of Oz vibes in my child perspective.)
It all felt like a somewhat magical or sacred space and transaction.
5/
After getting off the elevator, she would walk down a long hallway to a half-open (to retain the cold) Dutch door at the end and hand over the piles to the one man in the computer room.
(The trip always reminded me of going to see the Wizard in Wizard of Oz.)
The whole floor kind of vibrated.
4/
I’m followed by a lot of tech people, so here’s a little story about what tech history has looked liked in my lifetime:
My late mother began her programming career at an oil company in Houston writing binary code on punch cards. Occasionally, she had to bring me to work, and this is what I saw.
1/
Judging by the engagement on this post (or lack thereof), my weirdness has once again been confirmed, lol.
Anyway, welcome to my mind.
When I get stuck in an intellectual dead end (which can often be identified by a feeling of self righteousness), I think to myself, “Imagine a square wheel.”
It helps me look at things from a different perspective and get unstuck.
(In my mind, the wheel evolves into the rhombus tread of a tank.)
His forehead also looks much smoother. I think he might be receiving services from the White House in-house cosmetic injector as well.
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is “deeply concerned” that Israel is preparing to launch a large-scale military operation against Lebanon framed as an effort to “disarm Hezbollah.”
www.lemkininstitute.com/statements-n...
Statement on the Deterioration...