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From Big Blue
Frances "Fran" Allen, a pioneer in the world of computing, the first female IBM Fellow and the first woman to win the Turing Award, died on August 4, 2020, the day of her 88th birthday.
Fran grew up on a farm in Peru, New York. She graduated from The New York State College for Teachers (now SUNY – Albany) with a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1954 and began teaching school back at her local school in Peru. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned an M.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1957. In debt with student loans, Fran joined IBM Research in Poughkeepsie, NY as a programmer on July 15, 1957, where she taught incoming employees the basics of FORTRAN. She planned to stay only until her debts were paid, however, she ended up spending her entire career at IBM. Fran retired from IBM in 2002, but remained affiliated with the company as a Fellow Emerita.
As a pioneer in compiler organization and optimization algorithms, Fran made seminal contributions to the world of computing. Her work on inter-procedural analysis and automatic parallelization continues to be on the leading edge of compiler research. She successfully reduced this science to practice through the transfer of this technology to products such as the STRETCH HARVEST Compiler, the COBOL Compiler, and the Parallel FORTRAN Product.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Thursday August 06 2020, @06:42AM (3 children)
Back when the entry level salary you made with a master's in engineering was enough to pay back your student debts...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday August 06 2020, @08:43AM (2 children)
Actually there wasn't any student debt to speak of back then. Tuition was several orders of magnitude lower than it is now and honest work paid enough that you could cover costs. Combine the two factors and you could easily work enough during the summers to pay for school, food, housing, and still have a bit left over for a low-key trip to Europe after graduation. Back then it really was possible to flip burgers or drive delivery trucks and pay for college, graduation with no debt. As opposed to now where neither of those two jobs will even pay enough for food. A secord or third such job would be needed to pay for housing with multiple housemates.
Simply put, the US has stopped investing in higher education, just like it pulled the plug on primary and secondary education.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @12:20PM (1 child)
My father worked in a car battery manufacturing plant in the early 1970s - so well after Frances E. Allen went to college. He made between $8 and $10 an hour, which was around six times minimum wage at the time, and on top of that the inflation-adjusted value of minimum wage in 1972 is around $10/hour in today's money. He paid his apartment rent, bought a one year old car, and paid his college tuition and bought his books all with cash, and had plenty left over.
I worked the same job at the same factory in 1999, it wasn't that hard. I made $10/hour. At the same time, my father was managing a manufacturing facility in another state. He was in charge of 100 employees. He was making $110k at the time. So after getting a college degree in math and working in manufacturing for 27 additional years, his compensation - after you adjust for inflation - was the same as it had been when he was 20 with no experience, no degree, and managing noone.
Quick, somebody chime in with the lie that the decline of the American middle class is all due to mass laziness and moral decay.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2020, @03:12PM
Well if he would work as hard as the 10 Chinese laborers currently doing his previous job, he would make a living. Why is he so lazy and entitled he should earn more than them?