Fun overlaps
Your aunt may well have had my father as a math instructor at Tufts. He was teaching there at the time.
Boston-area mathematics was not very lucrative back then. My father had to work three jobs to make ends meet. Eventually, the family moved to California, where I was born. He more than doubled his salary in the process. As a mathematician in the high-tech haven that was Northern California in the later 1950s and through the 1960s, he solved differential equations by hand, including numerical estimation. The collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was relatively fresh in people's minds. Calculation was viewed as a must. But some sets of simultaneous equations would take him and his boss a couple of weeks to work out.
Computers were enormous curiosities. "Real" mathematicians didn't need them. My father never really embraced computers. The closest he got to a computer addiction was playing Gorilla-- a QBasic classic -- on DOS. Your aunt was the new generation -- computer savvy.
I studied econometrics in college, which was a computer-based pursuit by then. Eventually I vectored off into computers proper. For about 12 years I followed the siren call of assembly language programming, on IBM mainframes and on the early PCs -- 386 through the first Pentiums. It was fun work. I have a lot of respect for your aunt's ability to work directly in machine code. That's a real intellectual challenge, and machine code is utterly unforgiving.
The Old Ways! Kids today with their gangsta rock 'n' roll and their drag 'n' drop. They don't know the value of a base register. ;)
I enjoyed the article. Thanks for sharing your aunt's story.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
