Oral-History:Joyce Little

About Joyce Little

Joyce Currie Little (20 January 1934 - 1 October 2023) received a B.S. in Mathematics Education from Northeast Louisiana University in 1954; an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from San Diego State University in 1963; and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration for Computing Services from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1984. Her career in computing spanned more than fifty years and included teaching, curriculum development, ethics, and administration.

While in graduate school in San Diego, California, Little worked in the aerospace industry as a test engineer conducting data analysis on aircraft and missiles. From 1957 to 1960, she developed programs to analyze data from models being tested in a wind tunnel for Convair Aircraft Corporation. After earning her master’s degree, she took at teaching statistics and serving as Assistant Director of the first computer center at Goucher College in Maryland. In 1967, she became the computer facility administrator and the chairperson of the Computer and Information Systems Department at Baltimore City Community College. In 1981, Little joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Towson University in Baltimore, and in 1984, she became the Founding Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. After thirty years at Towson University, Little retired in February 2011 as Emeritus Professor, Computer and Information Sciences.

During her academic career, Little created courses, published, and lectured on metrics and assurance for quality in software engineering, the impact, cyber-ethics for workforce education, and the role of women in computing. In 1999, Little presented a paper “The Role of Women in the History of Computing,” at the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society. (Little, Joyce Currie, "The Role of Women in the History of Computing." Proceedings, Women and Technology: Historical, Societal, and Professional Perspectives. IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society, New Brunswick, NJ, July 1999, pp. 202–205.)

Little was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Data Processing Management Association (now AITP), and the IEEE Computer Society. Her awards and honors include: the DPMA EDSIG 1986 Educator of the Year; the Baltimore Chapter AITP Outstanding Information Sciences Professional, 1991; the annual ACM Distinguished Services Award, 1992; Fellow of the ACM, 1994; Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1995;Woman Pioneer Award in 1997, given by the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing; Towson University President’s Distinguished Service Award, 2000; and the annual ACM SIGCSE Lifetime Service Award, 2006. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

About the Interview

JOYCE C. LITTLE: An Interview Conducted by Janet Abbate for the IEEE History Center, 9 September 2002

Interview #637 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Joyce C. Little, an oral history conducted in 2002 by Janet Abbate, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

Background and education

Abbate:

This is an interview with Joyce Currie Little, September 9th, 2002.

You were born January 20th, 1934?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

Where did you grow up, and what were your parents doing for a living?

Little:

I grew up in Louisiana, in West Carroll Parish, in a little town called Pioneer. My mom and dad lived on a farm that had been part of the acreage that my grandfather had gained when he came over from Mississippi and brought his four boys. He moved from near Magee, Mississippi, to this little, small town called Pioneer in West Carroll Parish, and he came over because his older son was really interested in moving there. Not only was it supposed to be very fertile ground for farming, but his girlfriend’s parents had moved there, so that sort of spurred the family to move.

Abbate:

I see.

Little:

So, we grew up on a cotton farm.

Abbate:

I’d read you were from Pioneer, Louisiana, and I thought that was a metaphorical statement! [laughs]

Little:

[laughs] No; Pioneer actually had a high school, a consolidated high school, where kids came from many miles around to go to school, grades one through twelve. It’s now smaller than it was then. It was very large for a time. There is no high school there anymore. It’s very close to the archaeological dig called “Poverty Point” that you may have read about, near Epps, just out in the country from Epps, Louisiana. It’s 3000 years before Christ. It’s the oldest Indian mounds and oldest civilization, apparently, in this hemisphere.

Abbate:

I didn’t know that.

Little:

So I grew up running around the farm, and climbing up on these mounds, and riding horses; and chopping cotton, and picking cotton, and doing almost everything else you did with cotton.

Abbate:

And you had one older sister?

Little:

One sister, two years older.

Abbate:

What did she end up doing?

Little:

She became a medical technologist and graduated from McNeese State College in Lake Charles. I graduated from Northeast Louisiana State College in Monroe. She had gone off to school two years before I did, and my dad said, “I don’t want another one that far from home!” [laughs] So, he kind of pushed me to go to the closest place.

But I was a basketball player, you see, and I really wanted to go to Mississippi to college, because I was offered a basketball scholarship over there, and I really wanted to go play basketball; and in Louisiana, women’s colleges were not yet to the point where they were having competitive basketball.

Abbate:

But you ended up going to Louisiana . . .

Little:

Well, I wound up going to Northeast Louisiana State, and I majored in physical education. I was going to be a basketball coach.

Abbate:

Now, I’m curious: both of you went into technical fields. Did your parents encourage you to? Did they have technical interests?

Little:

They both encouraged us to go to college. My dad used to laugh and say that he learned everything that there was to learn in Louisiana Tech in a week; he went to Louisiana Tech for a week, and he dropped out to marry my mom. No, they didn’t push us into technical subjects, but I often have thought of that, because when you grow up on a farm and you do things with nature and with animals and crops and all that, you really have a close tie to scientific principles. I helped my dad put the tractor together every winter, whether it needed it or not; he’d take all the farm equipment apart and put it together again. I was just apt to do things like that. I used to take the radios apart and the clocks apart, to see how they worked. I was kind of assigned to help my dad; my older sister was kind of assigned to help my mom.

Abbate:

Interesting.

Little:

So, she became more of a household person, and I became more of an engineering-type person, I guess!

Abbate:

Were you very interested in math or science in school?

Little:

Oh, yes! In fact, math was my strongest subject in high school, and I had this absolutely fabulous gentleman as a math teacher. He was such a driving force in our lives that seven or eight of our group from that little, tiny high school wound up going off to college and majoring either in math or engineering. He had a way of not only covering the subject but allowing you to push ahead as far as you could, and to compete with each other to see how far you could get. So it was a very competitive high school math environment for me.

Abbate:

And you liked the competitive aspect?

Little:

Yes, I did. I really loved mathematics, and I had math as my minor when I was going to major in physical education.

Abbate:

That was Charles Parker, who was the math teacher?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

Did he have some . . .

Little:

He had an engineering degree. He was a graduate of Louisiana Tech, had an engineering degree, and according to him—I remember him telling us—he wanted to work in engineering after his degree, because he’d grown up in the South; but he had a vision problem—he had very thick glasses—and he said that a lot of the kinds of work that he did were very hard on his eyes, so he kind of switched over and became a teacher.

Abbate:

Okay, I was wondering how he ended up doing that.

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

When you went to Northeast Louisiana State for college, did you go straight from high school to college?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

And that was in 1952?

Little:

1952. I went the summer of 1952, and 1952-1953, and the summer of 1953. It was in the fall of 1954 that I found out that I had a very serious illness. I was going to graduate in three years; I had really wanted to graduate in three years. I lived in the dorm and often went home on weekends; my mom and my dad would come and pick me up to go home on weekends. But I found out, as a Phys Ed (physical education) major, that I had tuberculosis. I was one of those hundreds of people who got sent over to go into the mobile bus to have your X ray made, and of all the people who were questioned after—I mean, there were probably seven or eight of us who were questioned after—I was the only one who wound up discovering that I had what they called an “active case,” which apparently had just begun. So, I had to drop out of college, and I went into a tuberculosis sanatorium in West Monroe, Louisiana, and stayed there a year and a half. I had an old codger of a doctor, who was himself retirement age at the time, and he had looked at my background and studied my history and all that and knew I played tennis and basketball. I was playing basketball on an independent team as well as playing tennis on the college intramural team. He said after six months, “You’re okay, and this disease is arrested, and you’ll probably be okay, but I’m not about to let you out of here because you will go do it to yourself again.” [laughs] So, he kept me there for a good bit of extra time, and I got experience working. They gave me a half-time assignment. I would help the doctors and nurses, and keep some of the records, and do a lot of that; and then I would still have to have a certain number of hours of rest every day. So, it was quite an interesting experience. But it really did change my life, because when I went back to college, I could not major in physical education anymore. So, I turned my math minor into my major, and I chose biology as my new minor because I’d had so much [of it]. I’d had kinesiology and all kinds of biology already as a phys ed major.

So, I wound up graduating in math [in 1957]. As a matter of fact, I graduated in math education because I had decided to do practice teaching. So, I taught one semester in an eighth-grade math class and absolutely hated it. I decided I didn’t want to teach! When I graduated, I was interviewed on campus by a company that had come to campus to interview, in particular, people in math, so that’s how I happened to be hired by General Dynamics Corporation. They interviewed some people from physics and a few people from mathematics. I didn’t know it at the time, but I later found out that they were specifically looking for women mathematicians with high grade-point averages, and I later learned that that came from some studies done of the ENIAC women programmers.

Abbate:

Really!

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

So, people in industry were looking at that and saying, “It worked for them.”

Little:

They were looking at women mathematicians and saying, “We need people.”

Convair

Abbate:

So, General Dynamics: what was the relation with Convair?

Little:

Convair is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.

Abbate:

Okay.

Little:

It’s the airplane division. So, I was hired to go to Convair, in San Diego. They actually called me a “Testing Engineer,” because there were no job titles for computer people in those days! [laughs]

Abbate:

But you were hired specifically to work with the computers.

Little:

To work with computers, yes.

Abbate:

And that was their category. But you were an Engineer, which I think is more status than a lot of early programmers got when people didn’t know what to call them.

Little:

That’s right.

Abbate:

Or at least in the engineering world, it’s important to be called an engineer.

Little:

I don’t think [the company] did that everywhere. But they did that here, because this was the low-speed wind tunnel, where we were testing aircraft models; so the computer work for that was considered by them to be just another part of the engineering opportunity. I know people that were over in the main computer center of the corporation at that time were not called Testing Engineers like I was. So, job titles were very ambiguous then.

Abbate:

Were you paid the same as the men Test Engineers?

Little:

Oh, no! No. Well, there was no male Test Engineer in my particular category; there was one other woman. The men who were Aeronautical Engineers were, of course, paid a lot more. There were maybe fifteen or twenty of them and one-woman Aeronautical Engineer. The two of us who were responsible for the computational analysis were not even in the same category as those other engineers. In fact, we wore candy-stripe badges! [both laugh] There were badges for professional employees, and there were badges for people who were supportive to that, and they were given “candy-stripe” badges, as they were called. So, she and I had candy-stripe badges, and we had to clock in and out on a time machine, and they did not. So, we were considered non-professional, as compared to the other engineers.

Abbate:

Would a male support technician be a candy-stripe person?

Little:

Probably, yes. Probably.

[We were considered non-professional,] even though we both did mathematical analysis and a lot of work that you might consider you would need to have a higher-level knowledge for. And then, of course, we had to learn computer programming, and at that time we had such a wide variety of machines, it was not just one language or one type; it was quite varied. The major output from the wind tunnel went into maybe eight or ten different kinds of data collection devices, of which one was punch cards. The data captured on punch cards were put together with programs that calculated aeronautical information like lift and drag and whether or not the plane could take off in a certain amount of feet and so on. So, there was mathematics and a lot of other technical things involved, other than just the computer.

Abbate:

So, were you both doing numerical applications—“This is the analysis we want to do. How do we translate that into a program?” —and then also coding it?

Little:

The person who was there before me, the one who first taught me how to operate my first IBM 650, did not want to be a programmer, and she did not do programming, but she learned how to apply the correct parameters to the data. So, if data came out and there were punch card decks, she would look up the settings for that particular run—the simulated temperature and all of these things—and she would put the proper parameter card with that data. But when I came, they said, “We want all these folks in the future to actually write programs.” So, I did get sent to three or four different training programs. These were with other people who were learning the computer applications, but for their departments, so nobody else in my training programs was from a mathematical sense, as I was.

I was in one of the first FORTRAN classes ever offered at our site, in (I think) 1959. But before that, we had been writing programs in assembler; and before that, I was writing programs in machine language for the IBM 650; and several of the machines we had were small machines. Of course, when I was hired, I didn’t even know what a computer was, so I really had a lot to learn!

Abbate:

Did you specifically want to work with computers? Had you thought about that before? Or did they make you this offer, and you thought . . .

Little:

Well, I had two very favorite math teachers in college, and I remember mentioning that I was getting this offer to work in the computer field, and I didn’t even know what a computer was. Both of them said, “Go for it!”

Abbate:

Interesting.

Little:

They said, “That’s the future. Go for it.”

My criteria were very simple: I wanted the job that made me the most money and was the farthest from home! [both laugh] This was San Diego; it was a long way from home. My mom and dad, after limiting my college distance to be away, were shocked. “How dare you want to go so far?” But they convinced my sister to take a leave of absence from her job and go with me, so that summer of 1957 we drove to San Diego together. The double irony is that after we got out there, she liked it, and she wrote home she was going stay! [laughs] She still lives in San Diego. She married someone there, and she’s been there ever since. My dad used to laugh and said, “Oh, I shouldn’t have educated you girls! If I hadn’t educated you, you might have married the sharecropper down the road, and I’d get to see my grandchildren once in a while!”

Abbate:

But he must have been proud of you.

Little:

He was very proud. I remember bringing home some of the first terminals, ever, that you could tap into the phone line, and you could dial in to your computer. I demonstrated doing that for him, and he just said, “I can’t believe it; I don’t know what I got you girls into!” [both laugh]

Abbate:

And when was that?

Little:

He passed away in 1979, so it must have been 1975, 1976. We were on Tymshare machines, and I was already in Baltimore at the time that I took the terminal home to show him. It was before PCs.

Abbate:

When you first used a computer at Convair, what was that like?

Little:

The first few weeks, I didn’t even use computers. Because I came in the summer, the guy who was the Director of the wind tunnel put me a week in one staff position, and a week in another, and a week and another. I thought, “Oh, this is terrible. I’m not getting to do what I came here to do. A week here and a week there . . .” By the time he came around, I was complaining about it, and he sat me down and he said, “I want you to know the whole operation. Haven’t I done that?” [laughs] Which was true; I did know the whole operation. Then he said, “And now we start you on the computers.” Everybody was back from vacations; I had accomplished this by covering for them while they were on vacation.

The first computer that I used was the major one that had been doing all the analysis. There was a program that had been written by staff in the main computer center, and it was the one that Maggie had been using to put the proper parameter cards on the decks, and then she could go and run it and bring back the calculations. It was an IBM 650. It looked like one of the old-fashioned gas pumps at a gas station. It was tall, had a little shelf, had little dials on the front that you had to set when you booted it, and you sat in a chair there at that little shelf when you started it. It had only punch-card input and only punch-card output—at least ours did; there were some, I heard, that had mag tape, but ours did not. The larger machines were, by that time, the IBM 7090s, and they of course were predominantly magnetic tape input and output, but our application didn’t use those at that time.

Maggie had taken me over [to the computer center] and taught me about how, when we walk in the door, everybody gets out of the way! [laughs] Because the wind tunnel was so expensive to run and manage that when a wind tunnel test came to conclusion, they held everything up and didn’t change any of the configuration of the model until we got back with the analysis. So, we had to rush over there—I mean, we were really rushing over there—and the minute we walked in the door, everybody thought, “Oh, no, here they are again!” We bumped everybody off the machine; got on the machine; loaded our work; punched out the punch cards for the answers; ran over to an old IBM 407 tabulator machine, where we printed the answers; and then we went charging back to the wind tunnel—and everybody said, “What took you so long?” So it was during that era that we got the roller skates, for one particular project when we were working night and day. There was a huge building that was Model Design for almost the entire Convair Aircraft Corporation, and it was about the size of a football field, and we had to go through that to get to the building that had the computer in it. So that was where the skates really came in handy! [laughs] We only used those on one major project that was with American Airlines. We thought that we had a chance at getting a very large contract with American Airlines to sell them the Convair 990 aircraft, which was supersonic speed. We had to rush on that one, and that was in particular the one that we used the skates on, because if we didn’t prove that that airplane could take off in less than a mile, consistently over time, they were not going to buy our planes. When we finally did go through the evidence and show that it could do that, we won the contract from American Airlines. So, there was a big ceremony, and the two of us got brought to the front: the Test Engineers were introduced as the ones who did the computer work for this project.

Abbate:

So, you really got recognized for that.

Little:

Yes, we did, for that project.

Abbate:

Did they give you a real badge after that?

Little:

No, we still had our candy-stripe badges! [laughs]

Abbate:

Well, your athletic background certainly came in handy!

Little:

It came in handy! Very handy.

Convair was an interesting experience in other ways, too. It was my first real job, and so I didn’t realize what all the other things are that are in the environment of your position that are interesting. For example, I found out that they had a darkroom and that they encouraged you to take photography classes, so I did. I wound up learning how to process film and develop film—even color—and got very interested in the photography club. Several of the Engineers in my group, Aeronautical Engineers, were in the club, and they were encouraging me to go out and help them do photographs. So, I joined this little fledgling photography club and took lots of pictures, all over. In fact, a group of us formed what we thought would be a little business, and so we started taking photographs of events. I took photographs of the motorcycle races that were going on in Mexico on one weekend; and we got an opportunity to do photographs of the sailplane competition that goes on every year in San Diego, at the cliffs, and that allowed me to go up in planes and shoot photographs from planes, and so it was really a lot of fun. So, then I joined the airplane club—there was also an airplane club—and I took ground school instruction, for learning how to fly. Actually, if I had not gone back to graduate school for my Master’s, I probably would have gone all the way in that and learned to be a pilot; but I went back to graduate school.

It was interesting, because the aerospace business has its ups and downs, economically, and there’s lots of layoffs. Government funds huge projects. They beef up and hire a lot of people; and then when those decline, they lay off a lot of people. Over history, aerospace has this up-and-down pattern. So just as I was getting ready to go back to graduate school, there was a decline—this was, I guess, the summer of 1960—and so my boss came to me and he said, “You’re going back to school anyway. Do you mind if I lay you off?” [laughs] “Well, it might look bad on my record. Why do you want to lay me off?”

He said, “Because it’ll save Hugh his job. I won’t have to lay somebody else off.” So, I got laid off, and then in January I got re-hired, and then I got laid off again. Next summer I got rehired, and then I got laid off again. So, I had an interesting relationship with the group, because even after I was in school, I was still officially—or unofficially—attached to them: keeping in touch, and going back and learning what they were doing, and working some, and then coming back. It was a good relationship. So, if you look at my record, you’ll see I got laid off three or four times! [laughs]

Abbate:

Well, nowadays that’s just . . .

Little:

It’s just ups and downs of corporations.

Abbate:

No one thinks there’s anything personal about it. [With the dot-com bust], it’s almost a badge of honor nowadays! [laughs]

Little:

[laughs] Yes.

Abbate:

Why did you decide to go to graduate school?

Little:

Well, it’s hard to imagine, but I actually got a little bit bored with the work I was doing, even though I had learned how to write programs for seven or eight different computers—we had very small computers as well as very large ones—and I had learned FORTRAN. But I didn’t see an opportunity to move up, and I thought, “Well, I’m in this computational analysis–type job, and I know there’s more out there that I might want to do, might want to consider.” It got to where I wasn’t really being challenged as much as I wanted to be. Several people that I knew had gone on in mathematics at San Diego State, and so I finally decided, “I think I’ll do that.”

I started saving my money about a year before, so that I could spend a year in school, thinking a year would be enough. But as often happens, I was actually tempted to do some traveling. I had never really traveled, and there was a group from one of the local German Associations. There were these lovely little cottages in San Diego Balboa Park, and each one of them was from a different country; so you could visit these little cottages, and it was like visiting Austria, or visiting Sweden; and a lot of times on Sunday afternoons we’d be all down in Balboa Park, and we’d be visiting. The people at the German house had said, “We’re running a trip to Germany, and we’re even going to have a schooling opportunity.” I had found out at San Diego State that I would be required to pass a language exam in my proposed master’s program, so I thought, “Well, that might be a good way to learn German: by traveling.” So, I signed up to attend a university in Austria in their summer program. They had various levels of language capability, and I was in “Course A.” I wound up spending, I think, six weeks in the summer session in Salzburg, which was a wonderful experience; and there was touring before that and touring after that.

When I came back, I was really broke—I had spent my money I had saved—so I wound up accepting a teaching assistantship. That got me back into teaching; after my eighth-grade practice-teaching experience, I hadn’t liked teaching. I went back into this teaching experience, working with one of the professors and managing the labs for his courses. In fact, he was teaching the only computer course they had at the time, which was a junior-year “Combinatorial Principles for Digital Computers.” The book was by Dan McCracken. [Probably Dan McCracken, Digital Computer Programming. Wiley, 1957.] That’s the course I was in when I met my husband. He was a student in that course.

Anyway, they didn’t have any introductory programming courses. When [the professor] and I were chatting, he would not even let me take that course for credit. He said, “You already know everything in it, so you can’t take it for credit.” So, I audited the course, and with his encouragement, I developed the first programming course that San Diego State ever had: a FORTRAN programming course for freshmen. I developed it and then taught it for two or three years.

Abbate:

Were you teaching the very first year you were there?

Little:

I was teaching pretty much the first year I arrived there! [laughs] One stroke of luck was that the computer they had just gotten was an IBM 650, and it turns out I was one of the few people who knew what to do with it. So, I wound up teaching right away.

The smaller machines we had at Convair were programmed, but they were not programmed in the same way. Looking back on them, I think it would be wonderful to have those kinds of machines, rather than PCs, for little children. Because with PCs, and with a lot of programming, everything is online now, and so it goes off and it does things and comes back, and a student doesn’t know what’s happened in between. Most of them don’t even realize what the compile process is with a language, because they don’t see that part. In these older machines, you not only saw that part, you had to take that part and do something with it. So, I think the learning that some of us older folks got was such a good foundation, which today’s students are not getting, because they don’t see those steps in between.

For example, one of the first machines I programmed was a pinboard. It was a desk-sized machine, and it had room for (I think) three pinboards, and you could write maybe fifteen or twenty steps. You’d put in a pin: “Add location ten to location seven”; “move location seven to the output area.” Those simple, almost machine-language steps that were done on the pinboard were a real groundwork, a real foundation for learning.

Abbate:

I’ve never seen that. What kind of machine was that?

Little:

Now, let me see, which one was that? The pinboard was the Burroughs machine; it was an Electrodata E101. There was a Flexowriter that was also Burroughs. Two or three of those were programmed with paper tape; so you had to actually sit at a machine and key in on a paper tape what the steps were in your program. And then, of course, when you found an error—as you always did—you had to fix it: you had to copy that paper tape to here, and then enter something new, and then copy the rest to there, and it was always quite a long process to just get your program corrected. Now, in today’s society, people don’t see those steps of how those corrections are being put in, and what’s happening underneath. But the pinboard machine: somewhere in my stuff I have a manual for that machine, and also I have a manual for the Flexowriter machine, because I kept manuals for each of the machines I worked on at the time.

I think those experiences really benefited me, because not only did you learn—as you do in a FORTRAN program—what the problem is and what the formulas are that you’re trying to do, but you also knew the steps that the machine had to go through in order to process that. A lot of people entering the field, even at the FORTRAN level, didn’t understand what was going on underneath. Even some of the earliest trainers that IBM sent us with FORTRAN would show us the input and show us the output and never show us in between. We would say, “But where’s the assembler it generated? We want to look at that!” [laughs] We would look at that and say, “Oh, but it didn’t do this. Here’s what it missed!” We were real critics of the early stages of the language, because we knew assembler in the background.

Abbate:

Yes, that’s what Fran Allen [of IBM] was saying.

Little:

Oh, was she?

Abbate:

She said there were these die-hard assembler people, and you had to really convince them—by improving the performance of the FORTRAN—to finally get them to think, “Well, maybe this might be okay.” But that was a good thing.

Little:

It was. As a matter of fact, when FORTRAN first came out, you would hear people saying, “We don’t need programmers anymore.” It was a very short era where everyone was programming in machine language and assembler, and then FORTRAN came out. That was after ENIAC, and after things were done with wires and pinboards and all of that; but then when it finally became assembler—machine language and assembler—there was a very short period when that was the only way you could program. Then FORTRAN came out, and everyone said, “You won’t need programmers anymore. Every engineer’s going to program for themselves.” It’s interesting, historically, because I heard that again when COBOL came out: “We’re not going to need programmers anymore!” And then you heard that again when generator languages came out, like RPG: “You’re not going to need programmers anymore.” I’ve heard this so many times that every time I hear that I just say, “Oh, sure! Right.” You can predict anything, but . . . [laughs]

Abbate:

Do you think the definition of programming changed, in the sense that people thought at first, “If you’re not doing it in assembler, you’re not really programming. If you’re just writing some FORTRAN code, well, that’s nothing. Anybody could do that.” And then they decided that not anybody could?

Little:

I think the definition of programming has changed over the years. I think now, even people who are writing very complicated [applications]—writing their own Excel spreadsheets, for example—are actually doing programming of a sort. I think that’s also programming. That just means that there are so many different ways and styles and types of ways that you can do programming, and I think that will continue to change in the future.

Abbate:

Do you think we’ll always need programmers?

Little:

I do, yes. According to my definition, we will!

Abbate:

Well, it seems like if you’re doing something new, you must be, in some sense, programming. If you have some new application that no one’s ever done, then no matter how you do it . . .

Little:

. . . you’re doing programming. Right.

I remember when they introduced graphics packages. It was on an Apple. You didn’t necessarily have a lot of graphics packages before that; you did a lot of graphic plotting, but you always did it point-by-point, bit-by-bit. I remember there were the groups of folks that had had to do shape tables, me among them. You had to do your plot by means of these individual spots; you did your tables of the data, and then you would show it. So when graphics packages came out so you could perform graphics on the screen, they said, “We don’t need programmers anymore!” [laughs] “We don’t need programmers anymore, because we now have these graphics packages. Anybody can do this!” But even using those graphics packages, people have to know something about what they’re doing and how to set it up. So I still call that programming.

Abbate:

And somebody has to write the graphics package.

Little:

That’s right; somebody has to write the graphics package, too. But there’s a big difference between writing the graphics package and actually using the graphics package. So things do change.

M.S. in mathematics, management positions

Abbate:

You got your M.S. in mathematics in 1963?

Little:

1963, yes.

Abbate:

And you had met your husband in school, you said?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

Was he also a programmer?

Little:

He was a math major. He had been in the Navy and had been married there and had a child there, and he got a loan from the military to help him go back to school. He had been a baseball player, so we had athletics in common. He had actually graduated from high school and intended to be a professional baseball player. He went and had tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds, and he was in the tryouts that summer when he ran out of money and couldn’t stay. So, the Navy promised him that if he joined the Navy, he could play baseball for the Navy.

Abbate:

And did he?

Little:

He played on the Navy baseball team for almost two years; traveled all over the world playing baseball. Then they’d given him these aptitude exams, and they had told him that he had great mathematical-logical ability and that he should major in math when he ever got out: “But meanwhile, we’re going to put you in cryptography.” So, he did cryptologic work for the military, on a carrier. He was on the Midway carrier for a couple of years. He was the individual responsible for setting up the codes every day for every plane that left. They had to know the code and how to decode it to land back on the carrier.

With that kind of background of experience, he was more encouraged to major in math. He was in his bachelor’s degree math program when I was starting my master’s degree program. I had met him in that one course, using the book by Dan McCracken, which Dan later autographed for me! [laughs] I got a lot of satisfaction out of that.

He became more interested in statistics, and he tended to specialize in statistics. I even had two or three graduate courses in statistics.

When we had decided to get married, he had wanted to go to Baltimore, because he had let his son stay with his parents during his senior year of college, so little John Junior was with John’s parents in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He wanted to move to the East Coast to be close to him and get him back with him, so when we got married, we agreed to come to the East Coast for a year or two—and we’ve been here ever since! [laughs] It’s interesting how things change.

In 1963, I graduated with my master’s, and John F. Kennedy spoke at our graduation in May of 1963. Then we came to Maryland, and I was at Goucher College. I had accepted a position at Goucher to be the Assistant Director of the Computer Center and to teach one course in the Math Department, but mainly I helped the woman who was Department Chair manage the computer that they were using. They had an IBM 1620, which just happened to be the computer that I had helped Convair convert to in the summer of 1960, before I left. I had also used the IBM 1620 at San Diego State in summer of 1962, and we had actually taught our FORTRAN on that machine for a year or two. So, when I went to apply for jobs, and they were getting this machine, they said, “Oh, thank goodness!” It seems like lots of positions I’ve had have been just luck, that the experience I had just fit what people wanted.

We set up an IBM 1620 in a computer lab under the Math Department, but we began to do administrative applications on it as soon as we could. It was an NSF-funded machine, so we had a year or two of classes and teaching and things like that. The interesting thing about that position is that I wanted to develop a FORTRAN course, which I had been doing at San Diego State. “No, no, no! That’s a non-credit thing. You can teach it, but you have to teach it after school. It’s extra credit. Students have to take it, but they don’t get any credit for it.” So it was like a club; like a science club or something. I taught statistics, and on the side, I taught FORTRAN after school for the students who were taking numerical analysis; they had to come to this class to learn how to write the programs for the numerical analysis class. I had, of course, taught numerical analysis also, and I had programmed many approximation formulas, like the Runge-Kutta method, at Convair; so I knew what it was they were trying to do—I just couldn’t understand why it wasn’t part of the course! Many years later, in the sixties, I got a phone call from a colleague who had been there at the time, and she said, “Joyce, two things happened today at Goucher that you’ll be very interested in. Number one, we made computer science a major; and number two, we terminated Latin as a major!” [both laugh] So it eventually became courses.

But that experience was so helpful to me because I had never done business applications before. Having to manage the computer center, and supervise student help, and to actually try to do analysis for room scheduling, for example: it was a whole new world to me! I became very good friends with one of the bookkeepers, and she used to have me just follow her around to see what she was doing, because then I could see where the data came from, and who it was going to, and all of that. It was very helpful to me. I gained a real appreciation of project management, and of management of a facility, and of the need for staff, and the kinds of skills people needed to have in jobs. So, it was a big opportunity for me, in that it really contributed to my later work to have gone through that.

Abbate:

Was that the first management position you had?

Little:

Oh, yes. It was my first. And it was challenging, because at that time, on an IBM 1620, we were going to be doing business applications! [laughs] It was a real challenge, because everything was still punch cards, and we did not even have a collator; we did not even have a sorter machine. So, what I did was, I got on the phone, and I called around, and she [the bookkeeper?] had said, “Well, there’s a really good friend over at Morgan State, and they have all kinds of punch-card equipment.” So, we made a deal with them that they could use our IBM 1620 if we could use their punch-card equipment. We’d go charging over there to collate master files with transaction files and come back and then run them on the 1620.

Abbate:

How far away was that?

Little:

From Goucher? Three or four miles. Morgan State is very close. Towson is really close, and Morgan State is really close. It’s interesting that the year that I applied to Goucher, I also applied at Towson State, which is where I am now (of course, it’s now Towson University). They actually offered me a position, but they had no computer and didn’t have plans to get one, so they offered me a position teaching five sections of algebra!

Abbate:

And you said, “Hmm . . . ” [laughs]

Little:

“Thank you, but no thank you!” [laughs]

So, Morgan State and Goucher sort of became partners. They were doing a lot of unit record work but didn’t have, at that time, a computer. Later they were getting the same one we had, so we would use their punch-card equipment, and so on. I really learned a lot about systems analysis, and requirements analysis, and putting things together, and also evaluating. I also learned a lot about how you need a staff. In fact, I finally left that job because the campus refused to hire anyone as a permanent staff. We were relying on student help for everything—absolutely everything—and I just got called in one time too many in the middle of the night.

Abbate:

Well, what kind of staff did you have? You were the Director; who else was there?

Little:

I was the Assistant Director. Dorothy Bernstein was the Director, and she was the Chair of the Math Department. She did not actually work in the Center, even though she was in charge of it; so, she had me hire student help. We got to the point where we were producing runs—they would need a report, and it would be needed tomorrow—and the student didn’t show up, and the student [on the previous shift] had to leave, and I would get a call: “Well, I have to leave. I have a test tomorrow; I have to study tonight; and so-and-so didn’t show. What am I going to do?” So, I would go in and run the report.

Abbate:

So, the people operating the machines were students?

Little:

They were all students.

Abbate:

Doing the card punching and everything?

Little:

All students. The administrative offices eventually got their own punch-card machines so that they could punch their own cards, but even they had a lot of students helping with that. And once they got dependent on running the reports on our computer, they had no backup for that. If they didn’t do it that way, they just [didn’t do it]. We even automated certain things in the bookstore, and they just had to have a report—once a week they had to know. It got to be so much of a prison, almost, that I just felt, “I can’t live my own life, because I’m tied to this.” So, I went and tried to persuade them to hire staff, and they said, “No, no, no, we can’t afford that.” “Well, I’m out of here!” [laughs]

So I went to Baltimore Junior College [in 1965]. By then I had my son, my older son; and I said, “I’m willing to teach five sections of algebra!” [laughs] I remember the man’s amazement: “You’ve been running the Computer Center at Goucher and doing all that, and you’re willing to teach five sections of algebra?” I said, “Well, what else have you got?” (They always have sections of algebra! [laughs]) He said, “It just happens we’re getting a new computer. We just got it. It’s in; nobody knows what to do with it; it’s an IBM 1620. When can you start?” [laughs] So he hired me on the spot!

Abbate:

Lucky you!

Little:

And he hired me to help set up courses, which is what I really wanted to do: I really wanted to set up courses. That was really my first job at which my major role was to teach and set up courses, and that was really, really fun. I wound up staying there seventeen years!

Baltimore City Community College

Abbate:

This was Baltimore Junior College?

Little:

It was Baltimore Junior College, but two years after I came, it changed the name to Community College of Baltimore, and it’s changed its name now to Baltimore City Community College.

[This ¶ excerpted from survey:] At Baltimore Junior College I developed an Associate of Arts degree program in Computer Information Systems and Computer Science. I headed up the new department, hired other faculty, taught courses, and managed the IBM 1620 computer laboratory. I also assisted in the establishment of the first computer center and hired the first Director. Our program received an award for outstanding curriculum from an NSF pilot program to evaluate and identify quality programs that taught computing.

Now, when I got ready to leave the Community College, that’s when I was almost finished with my Doctorate. I had taken a year off without pay—a year’s leave without pay—to try to finish my Doctorate. I was still actually on call at the Community College all the time. The guy they had hired to take over that responsibility [needed help], because the two of us women who had been the major people there were both on leave that year. I didn’t finish that year, and when I started to go back, there were quite a number of things that were very disturbing that we’d heard about, that were allowed to be going on by the Provost—the Academic Vice President there. So, after a couple of visits back down there, my friend Phoebe Sharkey, who’s now at Loyola College, and I went in to see about returning the next fall; we were supposed to both return the next fall. We got told, “There’s nothing we can do about some of these issues unless you agree to take over as Chair again. If you take over, then we’ll let you do it, but we’re not going to do it. We can’t spend the time on it.” We both submitted our resignation letters together, and then two others in the department did the same thing. So, it was kind of a wash-out year that year, for them. And I just said, “Well, I’m just going to finish my degree, and then I’ll worry about where I work.” My husband was very supportive; he said, “Just finish your degree and don’t work for a while.” He was thinking that would be good for me.

I had already officially resigned from the Community College, and I got a phone call from a colleague, a friend, at Towson University—Towson State, it was then—and they said, “Well, we’re looking. You should come up here and talk to somebody.” So eventually I did that, and I wound up accepting a position. Even though I had not finished my degree, I accepted a position at Towson; and they even gave me half-time at half-pay for one year, to allow me to continue to work on my degree. I still didn’t finish [laughs], so I came back, and I was at Towson from the Fall of 1981. They had already applied for a Computer Science degree, but it had been put on hold by the State of Maryland. Everyone kept saying, “Well, if they ever approve the degree, certainly we have enough students; we may split the department.” So, they were kind of looking towards forming a new department.

Abbate:

You were in Math?

Little:

We were all in Math, and the Math Department had changed its name to Math and Computer Science, because we really had more students in computer science than the math courses did. So, we had heavy students and few resources; it was that time in the eighties when things were so rough. But in 1983, our program got approved by the state—finally, after ten years of waiting. It had been proposed, I was told, in 1973. They had decided they wanted to form a new department, so by the Summer of 1984 we had a brand-new department, and I became the first department chair.

Abbate:

Let’s go back a little bit. You were a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland.

Little:

Right.

Abbate:

When did you start that?

Little:

Actually, the year after Rob was born. I spent a year in Boston, 1968-1969. I was on a leave of absence 1968-1969, when John, my husband, was given a mid-career management year by the government. By then he was at the Social Security Administration, as a statistician supervising a lot of statistics projects. He was given a mid-management career year, and he was in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard for one year. So, I went with him that year and taught one year at the community college, Chamberlain Community College in Boston. Then I wrote the book—my major book, the RPG book. I had to teach RPG in Chamberlain Community College and never had any textbooks for it, so I wrote one. It came out in 1972, the same year Rob was born.

Abbate:

And what was that?

Little:

RPG: Report Program Generator. Prentice-Hall.

Rob was born in 1972. I was off a year when he was born, so I started shopping around for a doctoral program and finally wound up in a program at College Park that was interdisciplinary, through the College of Education, Computer Science, Business, and Mathematics. But I had started a doctorate before. When I came to Goucher in 1963, I had heard that there was going to be a Computer Science major at Hopkins, so I went charging down there and talked to them, and they said, “Well, eventually we’re going to have one, but we don’t have one now. But we have this wonderful doctorate now in Operations Research!” So, I got admitted to that, part-time, and I took sixteen or eighteen credits, part-time, between 1963 and 1966, I guess it was. So, I had credits beyond my master’s [degree].

Then when I went down to College Park eventually, I found out I did not want a doctorate in Computer Science, because of the types of projects that they would require you to be involved in and do. I wanted to do something more towards the managerial aspect of computing for higher ed, so they created this special program that had higher ed and management and mathematics and business-type courses, all put together with computer science. So, I did have some computer science courses from that department.

Abbate:

So that was sort of tailored for you?

Little:

That was sort of tailored, because I didn’t fit Business; I didn’t fit Computer Science; I didn’t fit quite exactly what all these opportunities were. It was a little ahead of its time. This specially tailored program was supervised by one guy from the College of Ed, who was in education administration, and two people from Computer Science: Dick Austing, whom you know, and Bill Atchison, was also on my committee. The two of them were very supportive of doing something with computer science, but that brought a broader perspective to it. And then within the School of Business we even had someone from the management side, and from Math I even had someone, but I had so much math already by then that I didn’t have to take much more math. I took several new computer science courses, though; things I had not had yet. They even made me take the Junior College course, which I resented: after all these years, I could teach that course! [both laugh]

I finally graduated in December of 1984. I had actually finished in the spring of 1983, but didn’t get around to all the paperwork, and turning everything in, and all that. So I was actually Department Chair at Towson when I wound up getting that degree!

Abbate:

Were you working full-time while you were doing this?

Little:

Pretty much.

Abbate:

And raising a small child?

Little:

Yes. My older son—my stepson—was fourteen when Rob was born, and so I had the two boys. My husband worked at the Social Security Administration, so he was very close to where we lived; we had moved to be close to Woodlawn. He usually went to work very early in the morning, but he got off fairly early in the afternoon, so I would be taking the children to school, and he’d be picking them up. So, we really both participated in dealing with this. And I was lucky that I really looked hard and found some really good household help—actually one of the women whom I had known at Goucher College, who had been fired because she objected to their low rate of pay. I wound up hiring her as sort of a half-time housekeeper. Then I found a woman through my church, the Presbyterian Church—she was a Roman Catholic, but she was working at our Presbyterian Church! She became a sitter, certain days a week. So, it was really a scheduling problem to be able to continue to work and do all that. There were only certain afternoons a week that I would go to College Park. It was a handful to juggle. I was younger then! [laughs]

Abbate:

I was wondering how you managed that. And you were also still teaching at Baltimore during this time?

Little:

I was teaching at the Community College of Baltimore when Rob was born. He was born in March, so I had taken off the Spring semester and the Fall semester following; but actually, I was there a lot, in spite of the fact that I was on leave, because I was [the Chair]. Actually, I wasn’t the single Chair of Department; I was co-Chair with a guy who had come from the business side of the field when they formed our department, which was about 1967. We started teaching there in 1965; they formed a department in 1967-1968; and he and I were co-Chairs for several years. He was an absolute expert at wiring boards for all the wired-board computers there were in existence at the time, including all the tabulating equipment, and he really resented having to learn programming! So, he was the business side of it, and I was the mathematical side of it, and together we sort of created the department. We eventually phased out wiring all the boards. [laughs] Eventually!

Abbate:

Kicking and screaming, I guess! [laughs]

Little:

Yes! Right. [laughs]

So, I was at the Community College of Baltimore when Rob was born, and I started my Doctorate right after Rob was born, and didn’t go to Towson until I had actually officially resigned from the Community College.

Abbate:

Were they supportive of working parents? Was there a lot of flexibility?

Ph.D., Towson University

Little:

Towson University was very supportive. In fact, by then they had several computer people to work for them, and they would say, “Do you want morning classes? Do you want afternoon classes?” They would be more flexible with your schedule. So I did have a lucky time in being able to say, “My classes are going to be these two afternoons a week. Don’t give me any classes those afternoons.” They were very supportive of that.

The Community College was supportive. I think the President, Harry Bard—who’s long since passed on—was absolutely a real inspiration to me, because he kept saying, “You don’t need another degree for what you’re teaching with us. You’ve set it up, you’ve planned it, you’ve managed it, you’ve run it for all these years. But I want you to know, I didn’t get my doctorate till I was fifty-five years old—so more power to you!” He used to say, “More power to you.” He was very supportive.

Abbate:

Even though he must have suspected you were going to leave when you finished it.

Little:

Well, you know, I don’t think he thought I was going to leave, because I really didn’t intend to leave after I got it. I really was going to stay there. I really loved the place; still do. I left only because of a circumstance that arose at a really rough time in its history, that involved what I and several others considered unethical behavior with students. We didn’t want to be in a department that allowed that to go on, and so we had said, “You’re either going to have to get this under control, or we won’t want to be a part of this.” And the guy who was the Academic Vice President at the time said, “I don’t have time to get involved in politics right at the department level.” He said, “I don’t know about any of these things that you all are saying are going on, and I don’t necessarily want to call in this Department Chair to find out about it. If one of you would come in, take over and be Chair again, I’d be all for that.” But neither of us wanted to come back and be Chair again; we wanted to come back just to teach. It was a point of being able to manage your families a little better; Phoebe by then had three children, later four. We both wanted to be there, but not necessarily be responsible for everything, and hiring every teacher, and keeping facilities running. We both had stepped back from that role, and we wanted to have a little bit more time for our families. So, we wound up having to make that choice; but we didn’t leave just because we got our degrees. We were both working on degrees, but not to leave.

Abbate:

What was your plan for getting the degree? Did you just want to learn more?

Little:

Well, I thought it would open a lot more doors. In fact, one of the people most encouraging me to get it was Dick Austing. I knew him already; I had met him through ACM. Several other people at ACM had all said, “You know, you really should think about getting your degree. You’ve got a lot going on, a lot of things and a lot of projects. If you want to apply for grants, if you want to do a lot of other activities, that degree is more recognized; and if you ever went into a four-year school, that degree is now getting to be more and more required.” So, I had set a goal for myself that someday I would get it.

Phoebe had, too, come to think about it. She’s an interesting one you might want to think about interviewing, because she first got into this field through the diplomatic service. She majored in diplomatic service and was going to be—she hoped—working at a Russian embassy. She learned Russian, spoke it very well. She is Greek. Her first job was at the CIA, doing Russian interpretation of computerized text. She teaches now at Loyola. She taught with me for many years at the Community College, when she was raising her children. But you know, it’s interesting how—well, you’ve interviewed a lot of women, I’m sure, so you’ve seen how many different ways there are to get into this field!

Abbate:

Yes.

I don’t know if you were trying to get a lot of grants before you’d gotten your Ph.D. Did you find it made a big difference?

Little:

Well, first of all, before I finished the degree, I had been a real stickler at meetings to speak up about what they were overlooking in the field. I got well known, because even at Ed Board meetings—Education Board of ACM—I would say, “You’re talking like that’s the only degree there is. There are other programs. You should be looking at developing programs in MIS; you should be looking at the breadth of the field; you should be talking to community colleges; you should be setting up guidelines for them. You should be doing a lot of this.” Well, the only one that really paid attention was Dick Austing; he was very encouraging. And of course, I sat there and watched while people from Georgia State, and a couple of other schools, and business schools, berated ACM for not developing guidelines in that area anymore. ACM had done that in the late 1970s and early 1980s [s/b 1960s and early 1970s?], and had not done anything after that. So these other organizations were going to pick up and move with it, and they were very business-oriented organizations.

So, I got involved with Curriculum 78. Curriculum 68 [was the first CS curriculum proposed by ACM. ACM Curriculum Committee on Computer Science. “Curriculum '68: Recommendations for the undergraduate program in computer science.” Communications of the ACM, March 1968, vol 11, No 3, 151-197.]. Dick and Bill Atchison, my two advisors, were both working on Curriculum 68 when that was released; so when Curriculum 78 came on, I kind of volunteered to be a person to go to meetings and discuss it and talk about it. I pushed and pushed and pushed, because nobody was paying any attention to Associate-level degree programs, and finally what happened was that after four or five meetings with Curriculum 78, they spun off a two-year college Activity, and I headed it up. We didn’t have any money, and Ed Board wasn’t about to give us any money, so Dick Austing and a bunch of folks at ACM SIGCSE—[the Special Interest Group on] Computer Science Education—at one of the conferences said, “If we make a profit this year, we want to give three thousand dollars to the Community College Group.” That was our start-up money. I headed up, from 1978 through 1982, an Activity that released five publications on community college curriculum. And it’s been interesting, for me especially, to watch because right now, those curriculum activities—Curriculum 2001 activities—have all been very careful to include the breadth. They not only have an IS-type program; they have Computing Across the Curriculum; they have Community College Activity. That breadth, I think, has come from a few people speaking out, years ago, to say, “We’re broader than that. Do something in that!” I’m very proud of that.

Abbate:

As opposed to just four-year computer science.

Little:

Yes, four-year computer science.

Abbate:

How early did you get involved in ACM?

Little:

I joined in 1968, when I was in Boston. I had actually been a member before, in San Diego State, as a Student Member of the ACM Chapter; but I couldn’t find any record of that anywhere. I remember being at ACM meetings with the student body there, but the first conference I ever attended—and the first time I know that my records go back to—was 1968. The year I was in Boston, 1968-1969, the ACM Conference was in Boston that year, and so I was very evident. I was everywhere; I was going to meetings, and watching, and talking, and meeting folks, and having a really good time. So I’ve been a member for a long time.

That Activity was not until 1978. The money we got was 1977 or 1978, and we held four or five Community College Group meetings, where I called people from all over the country: “Hey, guess what! We’re going to have a Community College Curriculum Group. Can you come?” [laughs] I think I stepped down from that in 1982 or 1983, after I had gone to Towson University and those five reports came out. But I remained on the Committee. I didn’t head up any of the task forces, but I remained on the Committee until just about three years ago. So did Dick Austing, and several other people have been on that committee a long time: former community college people. Even John Impagliazzo was at a two-year college for something like ten years, and he was on the Two-Year College Committee, even after he went to Hofstra. People used to ask, when we would give a panel session or something, “Why are you four-year college people telling us what to do?” [both laugh] We’d sit there and say, “You want to see my vita? Seventeen years [at a community college]!”

Abbate:

“I’ve paid my dues.”

Little:

I’ve paid my dues, right!

So: I didn’t really apply for grants or anything until [after getting the Ph.D.]. Actually, I only applied for my first grant, personally, two years ago; but I worked on other people’s grants. I worked on the Two-Year College grants; I was one of the five or six people whose names were on there; but I was not really a PI until we got the scholarship. The CSEMS NSF scholarship money we got two years ago: I applied for and got that.

Abbate:

What is that program?

Little:

“C-S-E-M-S” is the name of the program. It’s “Computer Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Scholarships.” It’s to increase the numbers of people majoring in those fields.

Anyway, that’s the money that comes from the H1B visas. That comes from the INS. Because companies can’t hire, they hire from other countries, and they have to pay a fee to do that; and Congress approved it only if that fee goes to growing our own.

Abbate:

I had no idea.

Little:

So this money goes only to citizens or permanent residents who want to major in computer science, engineering, math. We don’t have engineering, so we just have the computing and the math. But that’s the first time I ever really was a PI—even though I had reviewed for NSF for many years and was part of other people’s grants for many years.

[DISC 2]

Abbate:

We were just talking about the research grants that you had.

Little:

Right.

Abbate:

Did we skip anything at Baltimore Junior College? I know you were there seventeen years.

Little:

Well, there were several aspects of the position that changed over time. For example, in the very, very early days we didn’t have any [computer science] majors, because we didn’t call it a “major”; so the people who became our majors came out of our other classes—either the business classes or the math classes of the two of us who were trying to start building this department. We also didn’t have a facility. We only had this IBM 1620, which was in the back of the classroom, and they had no computer center.

Abbate:

So you just had one room with the computer in it, and that was it?

Little:

Yes. That was the whole thing. We did use punch-card equipment, but the punch-card equipment was down in the administrative area; it wasn’t really ours. So in those early days, one of the biggest challenges in teaching was not only to create materials and to find books—which didn’t exist very often—or write your own, but we also had trouble with resources. Where would you let students learn how to do things? Our IBM 1620 in the back of the classroom was a fantastic tool. That’s such a great teaching tool; that machine was wonderful for teaching. One person at a time; no operating system; very good display of memory—just wonderful: a decimal readout, which helped.

Our major goal was to establish a learning lab—you know, a lab for all of our equipment—because you can’t really have a good major unless you have equipment, so we were running people all over, trying to use equipment. What the university did was set up an administrative computer center, which we had permission to use. That was totally unacceptable, but we had to deal with it for several years. They finally wound up hiring a Computer Center Manager who said, “You can’t have your students in here.” You’ve heard this with radio stations: you set up a radio station so students can learn, and then you want the radio station to be professional quality, so you kick the students out and you hire staff. That’s what tended to happen in this discipline as well: you couldn’t get your students on to use equipment! You’d have them writing FORTRAN programs and submitting them through a window and never seeing the machine. So we really fought and fought and fought that, and eventually one of the things we did accomplish, when we created the Harbor Campus of the Community College, was that we created an Academic Computer Center, which was specifically for academic purposes. That trend kind of happened at other places, too, as people would realize that to teach this, you really have to have equipment. You couldn’t, for example, teach operating systems, because nobody would let you take down the operating system on the machine that was running everybody else’s work! So they eventually separated, and we had really good service, typically, for a while, although limited service.

But you know what’s happened recently: universities are merging [their computer facilities] again. Towson University is no exception. We have taken our Administrative Computer Center and our Academic Computer Center and all of our telephones—communications devices and Internet access—and put them all under one umbrella. Many schools are now doing that. The difference is that most people now recognize that students in classes have to have access, where they didn’t in that era of the sixties when we were fighting for access.

Abbate:

But even though they’re administratively merged, people aren’t using the same computers to do the payroll as to do a computer science class .

Little:

Typically, not. They’re administered together, but often there are different machines driving each portion. For example, our department has two machines that are specifically for computer science majors, and even though we help manage them, the central administration also helps us with those. But some other departments claim to still have trouble because they don’t have enough access. But of course, that gets you into questions, philosophy questions, about academia. Should every student on campus have full and complete, twenty-four-by-seven access to Internet for doing things like Napster and music? That’s not their course. How do you limit their use to just their courses? Or do you want to limit their use to just their courses? Because typically universities say, “We don’t. You can use anything”; but if a thousand of the fifteen thousand are over there monopolizing all the equipment, then how do the majors get their service? It still is a bit of a problem to manage, but it’s interesting, the evolution of how we’ve gotten there. Tough job, to manage a university computer facility.

Abbate:

When you started at Baltimore Junior College, they were just starting to have a computer science or information systems degree?

Little:

They hired the two of us, actually, to create that program.

Abbate:

And when you left in 1981, what state was that in?

Little:

They had a computer science degree, which was actually classified under CIS; the HEGIS code at that time was CIS. They actually had a computer science degree, even though it was classified under Arts and Sciences.

Abbate:

What code is this?

Little:

“HEGIS” was the Higher Education General Information Survey. It was the classification code by the United States Department of Education. It’s now called something else. But the codes for the majors: most majors that were considered “transfer” were classified at the community colleges as Arts and Sciences. So they considered the computer science degree a transfer program, and they considered the CIS program a non-transfer program. Interesting!

Abbate:

“Transfer” meaning you could take it and go to a four-year college?

Little:

Yes, take it and go to a four-year school.

Abbate:

But you couldn’t with the CIS?

Little:

Well, you couldn’t easily. All the programs that were considered “vocational”: you could always take them and go to a transfer school, but you couldn’t always transfer all the credits, and you couldn’t always guarantee that it would fit the program they had.

We were actually a little bit ahead of our time. The old programs had been called Data Processing, and they had mostly had been unit-record and wiring boards and so on. As that changed, those programs became known as CIS (Computer Information Systems) programs, and they were mostly computer-based business applications; yet “computer science” was considered like a mathematics subject. So the fact that we had both and we ran them out of one department was a little bit unusual, because there were very few degree programs in CIS at that time [that also incorporated the theoretical side of CS?]. Now there’s a lot of them—which means that those guys from Georgia State helped win that battle! [laughs] Eventually we got some four-year CIS-type programs and IS-type programs. But due to Curriculum ‘68 being released in 1968, computer science existed earlier as a four-year program, and so computer science people were considered a “transfer,” simply because there already was a four-year program—even though some of our computer science majors went to jobs.

That distinction between “vocational” and “transfer,” in the past, was quite distinct. It was really different. Even federal money was given to the vocational programs, but not to the transfer programs: Vocational Act money. [Vocational Education Act of 1963.]

Abbate:

Was there a status difference between them?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

So was there more status to a transfer program, because it was more academic?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

And you didn’t get the federal money because that was . . .

Little:

That was a four-year program. The vocational money was designed to provide technician-level training. Money for those kinds of programs—Automotive Technology, Air Conditioning Technology—all of those technologies got federal money, including the Computer Data Processing.

Abbate:

Because there was a perception that there was a lack of workers?

Little:

They were vocational, and there was a lack of people going into those fields. CIS got into that category because there were no transfer programs to speak of. You could go to a school of business, but they didn’t have a major, they had a few courses; and so, it was considered that category. What’s interesting now is that both programs are considered both categories! So, it was a time of great change.

There was actually a model guide, by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. H.E.W. released a report on technical programs in the computer field long before any association did, and I had gotten a copy of that, and it had three tracks. It had the “scientific track” of computer programming; the business track; and the third track was systems programming, I believe. There were three tracks. Community colleges had tried to take that and tried to adapt that to show that this is a technical field, and it does qualify for vocational funds, and it would not produce transfer students, but rather it would produce people to go into jobs.

Abbate:

That was in the sixties that they did that?

Little:

The H.E.W. report must have been—it was there before 1965. In fact, one of the first things I did when I went to the community college was call John Maniotes. He was at Purdue University’s two-year degree school. Purdue University had a two-year program as well as a four-year program. John Maniotes had gone to an ACM conference, and he had written a document on “What we teach in our two-year Associate Degree program,” so I called him and I got a copy of that.

Abbate:

That’s pretty early.

Little:

John Maniotes did his stuff in 1962, because I got it in 1965; and he had quoted from the H.E.W. report, so that must have been 1960, maybe 1961. Somewhere in one of my boxes I’ve got that document. [laughs]

Abbate:

There were hardly any CS programs in 1960, 1961. I’m surprised they were already reporting on it.

Little:

They were just the technical side of computer programming. In fact, the first computer programming class that the Baltimore Junior College ever had was offered in, I understand, 1958.

Abbate:

Wow!

Little:

I later met the guy who taught it. He was at Social Security, and it turns out he was a friend of my husband’s! He had taught it part-time for them. It was called “Introduction to Data Processing,” and it used a book by Dan McCracken. He had written an “Introduction to Data Processing” book. [The only textbook by Dan McCracken published before 1958 was Digital Computer Programming (1957), above.] Apparently, that was before his FORTRAN book. That was considered an evening course for people from industry to take. It was a credit course, but it was called “Introduction to Data Processing,” and it was 1958. Of course, it was 1965, 1966, 1967 before we actually had a degree that was called CIS.

Anyway, community colleges had a hard time, through that era.

Abbate:

That’s very interesting, though.

So then you you were at Towson in 1981.

Little:

I went to Towson in 1981; became the Department Chair in 1984; the degree was approved in 1983. Interesting reason why the degree took so long to get.

Abbate:

Which was . . .?

Little:

UMBC [University of Maryland, Baltimore County]. UMBC was a big battle in Baltimore. I remember going to political sessions about it. They wanted to build a campus in the city, and everybody wanted a campus in the city—a broader, general campus in the city, because we had the Medical School, we had the Dental School, but we didn’t have a general accessible campus, and it was so hard to get to College Park [the main University of Maryland campus]. So they were going to build this campus, UMBC—and they finally decided to put it in a cornfield outside the beltway! The city didn’t like that at all, because nobody would go there. So what happened? Everybody was beginning to request computer science as a major in the seventies, and they gave it to UMBC. Nobody else [in the Baltimore area] could have it for five years.

Abbate:

To force people to go to UMBC?

Little:

It was a magnet program to force people to go to UMBC.

Abbate:

I had no idea.

Little:

They canceled Info Systems at College Park [and moved it to UMBC]. And you know all the people at College Park that were supposed to move up there? Ben Shneiderman was one of the guys in that department. Guess what? He wound up finally getting accepted into Computer Science. They hadn't [initially] considered him a computer scientist, because his work was peripheral. He wouldn’t move here [to Baltimore]; the guy who was Chair [of Info Systems] wouldn’t move here; all those guys wound up going to industry, and they had a terribly hard time hiring anybody at UMBC, because nobody wanted to go there.

They finally hired a guy from the Social Security Administration, whom I knew, to head it up; and then they hired a guy from the College of Education to come up and head it up. It took hold eventually, and now it’s one of the biggest programs in the region. But in 1983, when they released the hold, they said, “Not only can you get it, Towson, but so can anybody else that wants it.” So, in 1983, anybody could offer computer science in the State of Maryland.

They had computer science at College Park, but they didn’t have the Info Systems at UMBC, nor anywhere else in Baltimore. When the State decided that they were going to open UMBC and they wanted to give it a magnet program, Computer Science at College Park was far too big and far too well-known by then [to disrupt], so they took Info Systems from College Park and moved it to UMBC.

Abbate:

So, no one else could have Info Systems or Computer Science?

Little:

Or Computer Science. And they gave Computer Science to the Math departments [to teach].

Abbate:

So, College Park had the only Computer Science, and UMBC had the only Info Systems?

Little:

Yes. But guess what: It didn’t take the School of Business more than a few years to figure out that they could, in fact, offer Info Systems courses.

Abbate:

And just call it something else?

Little:

And call it something else, or not call it a “major” for a while; and then eventually I think they were able to call it a major again.

But those interim years, about eight or ten years, was to get UMBC started and off the ground. Info Systems at UMBC is in a different department from Computer Science, and they have now merged Computer Science with Electrical Engineering, so it’s now an engineering school. So that’s had another transition since that time.

So Towson—even though we had all the courses—could not offer the major until the Spring of 1983, and we graduated fifty-nine people with three months’ notice.

Abbate:

So, they were in Math?

Little:

They were in the track. They were in Math with the computer science track—which was the requirement for our new major! [laughs]

Abbate:

And then you just converted it to Computer Science in three months. [laughs]

Little:

Right! So we had majors really right away. And then, of course, Morgan State started offering it, and almost all the other schools did, too.

Abbate:

I never heard that dark secret! [laughs]

Little:

Yes. [laughs]

Abbate:

So you were all set to do it. When did you have a graduate program?

Little:

Oh, as soon as we got the Bachelor’s. We had plans for a master’s [degree], which we couldn’t submit; this campus wouldn’t let us submit them while there was a hold on the Bachelor’s. So the year after the Bachelor’s got approved, we submitted the master’s, and that took about three years to get approved.

Abbate:

Did you have grad students in math who were also doing computing?

Little:

No. There were very few grad students on that campus at all, when I went there. Among the first programs to offer graduate programs were Biology, which offered a graduate master’s; and then later, Occupational Therapy, which is a regional program, offered a master’s [degree]. I think we now have one Doctorate—well, now we have a second Doctorate approved; a Doctorate of Instructional Technology has been approved, too. I think we now have two doctorates. We have applied for a Doctorate in Applied Information Technology, but we’re still waiting to find out about that. So it’s been predominantly undergraduate.

Abbate:

And you’re still at Towson full-time?

Little:

Full-time, yes. And it’s been a lot of interesting times—not being Department Chair after I was Chair for so long. I was Chair for seven of the first ten years, and we’ve gone through almost five Chairs since then, so we’ve had a lot of turnover. And we’ve grown tremendously; we’re very large. We’re going to be getting, for the first time, everybody put in one place, in January coming up.

Abbate:

Because you split off, and you have a new building?

Little:

Well, we never had enough space, so we had to use space in other buildings, and we have labs in three or four buildings around campus, and faculty in another building as well as our building. So what they’ve done is, they’ve taken a building that was on campus, and they have restored it, have rejuvenated it—it’s almost being reconstructed, but it’s not a brand-new building—and we’ll have most of that building, come January. So we’ll finally be all in one place, which will be wonderful. It’ll be our twentieth anniversary of our degree, so we need to have some kind of a special celebration—to finally be in one place after all that time!

For four years, supposedly, we were to be out of Stephens Hall, which is our classic Jacobean-architecture building, the big one on York Road. The year we were becoming a department, they moved us out of there, supposedly for four years. We went onto the fourth floor of the library, which was very difficult, because they wouldn’t let us have keys to get in and out to our offices. They wound up finding asbestos and all kinds of bad problems in our building, so we were in the library for seven years; and then we moved back to Stephens Hall, in much too small a space. So we’ve really been cramped over all of this period of time since our existence, in one way or another. So in January, to have our own building and our own place and everybody in one place, is going to be just a really grand thing! I said, “I can’t possibly retire till after that!” [laughs]

Abbate:

Right! [laughs] Just when it gets good!

Little:

[laughs] Right! I have to see that!

Ethics, professional certifications

Abbate:

Do you have more time for research now?

Little:

Yes, I have had quite a number of projects to do. I have been collecting material in computer ethics for quite some time, and I’ve been working on a textbook for quite some time.

Abbate:

A textbook on ethics?

Little:

On computing ethics. I have been one of the major people behind that. Doris Lidke and a couple of other people had, in the early days, supported the idea of doing that, and we in fact had our first so-called “Computer Ethics” course even before there was an ABET accreditation for it. The accrediting body of Computer Science is now ABET [Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology]; it was CSAB [Computing Sciences Accreditation Board] before that. ABET had put in this requirement that all graduates of computer science programs must have had some ethics education at some point—and we already had ours in! So I’ve been very influential in dominating and working in that area.

Also, I’ve been still doing the software engineering class, which an elective in our computer science major and our CIS major. After we got the master’s in Computer Science, we submitted a major in CIS, Computer Information Systems, and I was on the committees for getting that approved; so I’ve done a lot of curriculum work over the years. I’m now on two scholarship committees: the scholarship money we got from NSF, as well as the scholarship that one of our colleagues who passed away last year created, a scholarship for students.

Other than that, I’ve been very active on the Board of ICCP; I’ve been on that over fifteen years. ACM, when a guy named Fred Harris was President, had co-founded with the DPMA Group (which is now called AITP Group) a body to offer certification exams, and it was named Institute for the Certification of Computing Professionals: ICCP. I spoke up at a meeting once, when Fred Harris was giving a talk about it, to sort of complain a little bit about some of the things I had noticed at the community college level. So we talked afterwards, and several times later at other meetings, and eventually he invited me to participate in the creation of the new CCP exam, which I did. I’m trying to think what year that was: 1977. In 1977, we created the Certified Computing Professional exam.

Abbate:

So, this is a certification you can have that says, “I’m a Certified Computer Professional”?

Little:

Right.

Abbate:

It seems like there are debates going on right now about certifying software engineers.

Little:

Oh, yes.

Abbate:

I guess that’s a later step, or a different step?

Little:

That has been a recent innovation. The ICCP was formed in 1973, and they created that CCP Exam in 1977. Before that, they had two exams, if you go back in history. The CDP was a Certified Data Processor, and they had the RBP, the Registered Business Programmer. And the comments that I was making to Fred Harris were asking him, “Why in the world did you stop offering the RBP exam?” Because two-year college people coming out of the business option need that exam; that shows what they know! They dropped it at the time they were talking about the merger [of the ACM and DPMA certification groups] and forming ICCP. They still had the CDP, Certified Data Processor, which was really for the Computer Center Managers.

They then formed this task force, which I was on, to create the CCP Exam, which was Certified Computing Professional, which was supposed to replace the RBP. It had choices of scientific, or business, or system programming, or whatever; it had choices on it. That exam was eventually used to replace all the other exams, because they had started talking about a Systems Analyst Exam, and a Systems Programmer Exam, and they were getting full of alphabet soup; so they eventually said, “We’re going to have one exam, like the professional engineers have—one word, P.E., but you take different exams for your specialty.” So, they had one word, CCP, with different exams for your specialty.

In 1983, when I went off the CCP Task Force, I went on to the Board of Directors for ICCP, representing ACM, where I still am. It’s probably time for a change! [both laugh] I keep thinking, “I’ve got to.” But that has been so controversial, and has been so tied up, because all of the commercial certifications have come in kind of in the middle. They publicize so well, and they do their own teaching, they do their own courses, all of that, that they have really won the public’s awareness: whereas the professional certification that was formed by eight associations, which is now the CCP, is hardly even known.

Abbate:

No. I didn’t know it.

Little:

Hardly even known! It’s a matter of the fact that the eight associations evolved over time into, eventually, thirteen associations, and then back down to something like six associations—one of which is still ACM. But ACM, being a professional body, supports higher degrees, curriculum, all of that; and they don’t necessarily see the need for certification as much as they did in the sixties. So, I think the popularity of it has changed over time. I think there should be some way to evolve that in a gracious and mannerly way that can improve the profession, and we should be looking for that; because not everybody has degrees, and not everybody who works in this field comes through regular programs.

What has happened in Texas is that they decided to license the software engineers, so if you call yourself a “software engineer,” you have to get the license, and it is thought that many other states are going to be doing that. Maybe certain jobs will be licensed, which would require then some sort of an exam, like a certification exam like teachers have to take to teach their subject matter.

Abbate:

Are the engineering certifications state-by-state, or is that national?

Little:

The P.E. is national.

Abbate:

It seems like it would be just chaotic if the states all had a different software engineering certification.

Little:

But the CPAs do. CPAs, there is a national exam, but . . .

Abbate:

But aren’t there state accounting laws? I mean, there’s nothing state-by-state about programming.

Little:

No, but people didn’t know that in the past. They know it now. I don’t know what’ll happen with that now.

Abbate:

That’s very interesting.

Little:

Even lawyers are state-by-state. Even though they have a bar exam, they have to know state law as well.

Abbate:

Right. I mean, it makes sense if your body of knowledge is tied to the state in some way, but it doesn’t really make sense to me for computers. There’s no special Maryland computer architecture that only we have.

Little:

The Professional Engineers have several levels, and they actually have an entry-level P.E. exam that you take the year you graduate from college. The ICCP was trying to follow that pattern, not necessarily the CPA pattern, when they created the Associate Computing Professional, the ACP: because it’s an exam that you can take right out of school, that is kind of a model of the big exam. They created that, and there are quite a few schools that give that exam, especially two-year colleges. But it’s certainly not as well-known and not as prevalent out in the industry as the commercial certifications, which have really kind of changed everything, because those professional certifications are in fact very specialized—in fact, to a brand and a type [of software], except for CompTIA [the Computing Technology Industry Association]. CompTIA is an organization that has something like a thousand companies that have banded together to form a nonprofit group, and they offer the A+ exam, which is a technician-level exam. They also offer the i-Net+ exam, and now they’re going to offer a Web+ exam; and those are mean to be generic, not just one brand. So they’re trying to bring together the specific brands and look at the general information, and create an exam for the general information. So I consider those a level above the vendor exams, but they’re still not the professional exam that ICCP is claiming to be. So it’s kind of a complication.

Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time on that activity as well. And I guess that’s probably it! [laughs] I guess that’s probably all.

Abbate:

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

Little:

That’s a hard question! Because there are things that are really very big in your life, and that have had a very dramatic impact, even though that you might not consider them “accomplishments” so much. Professionally, I’m mainly really proud of the two areas where I was Department Chair and was able to promote things and push things along. There are lots of graduates out of those programs that still keep in touch, and that is really gratifying—when you get people who still say, “I would not have been in this but for you.” So, I guess I’m probably most proud of all those that I know have had a successful time in their profession because of getting a start like that. Very proud of that.

I’m also really proud of the work that we did for the two-year colleges, because it was really a breakthrough, I think. There had been a Two-Year College Committee before; in fact, a guy at Montgomery College in Maryland had headed it. I think it lasted two years, and it must have been in the sixties. I’ve been meaning to try to find out more about that, because this was 1978 [when I became involved], and they had no community college reports—except for the H.E.W. reports! [laughs] So, I’m really proud of that. I think that was a real breakthrough, to finally get something accomplished in that, and to get the big organizations to recognize that there are two-year programs and that they are important. So, I guess I’m proud of that.

[pauses.]

I guess I’m also really very proud of the fact that there have been some ways to recognize women; because I certainly agree that women have had different challenges, and coming out of an era in which women didn’t have as many opportunities—like my parents’ generation and so on—it’s really gratifying to see some of those women honored. I got invited to work on the Lovelace Award with AWC [the Association for Women in Computing], and I kept thinking, “I’m really to the point in my life where I’d like to stop doing things so much, and to cut back on things;” but that was one I really cared about, because it gives us a chance to honor women who have been active in the field. So, I’m very proud of that, too; that I’ve headed up that. We have chosen three [recipients]: Dorothy Denning was one, and we have the next two chosen; and we have to put out the call for nominations for the one after that, which would be 2004, and then I’ll probably step down from that. I’m looking a good replacement! [laughs] When I talked to our new AWC President about that, she said, “Oh, I wish you would keep doing it a while.” I said, “Well, I have to stop doing some of these things sometime.” She said, “Well, keep your eyes open for somebody to head that up.” I’m really proud to see women honored in that way, because I think a great many of them did have a lot more challenges, in order to really become what they did and be recognized for it.

What else? [pauses.] I guess I’m also proud of my family life. I really felt it was very important. My husband had been married before and had a child, and I agreed to take him, and did, and now he’s a major part of my life, still. And having my younger son: that was quite an experience. I didn’t expect it to be like that at all. I don’t think you really know what it’s like until you’ve had one! [laughs] Weird! I really learned so much from that.

Abbate:

What did your sons end up doing?

Little:

My older son is in insurance adjusting. He’s with a company in Houston, Texas. He had gotten into that after his MBA. When he got his MBA at University of Baltimore, he had actually wound up taking ROTC, so he had to go in the army for two years. The army had sent him all over. He was doing management stuff: where troops are, and where people are, and facilities, and all of that; operations. And so when he got out, he applied for and took the Insurance Examiners’ Exam, and he works in Houston, Texas. He gets up [to Baltimore] once or twice a year.

My younger son is a college drop-out, but he’s actually one of the most talented, creative people I’ve ever met. He’s constantly inspiring me because he was just constantly moving on into something new all the time. He works at Record and Tape Traders.

Abbate:

I don’t know where that is.

Little:

There are ten stores in Baltimore called Record and Tape Traders. He loves music; he loved theater; he loved the arts of all kinds; and so, he decided he wanted to go into something with music. I don’t know how, but he wound up here. He was majoring in mass communications in college, but finally dropped out. He’s had a little bit of a health problem that’s been a little bit of a stigma for him. He works as an Associate Manager at the Towson branch of Record and Tape Traders, where his vast knowledge of music and movies and theater really comes in handy! [laughs]

Abbate:

Did you see the film High Fidelity?

Little:

Yes.

Abbate:

Is it like that?

Little:

Yes! In fact, he asked me once if I would watch that, because he said, “Mom, I want you to see that, because that’s just like it is!” [both laugh]

Abbate:

But he has nothing to do with computers.

Little:

No, nothing. He’s very good with computers, and I really was kind of pushing him a bit to go into some computer type of work, but he wound up here.

Professional discrimination and barriers

Abbate:

Now, you’ve talked about how hard it’s been for a lot of these women. Did you feel that you faced barriers as a woman in terms of access to jobs, or pay, or promotions, or harassment, or anything?

Little:

Actually, being one of those women who was previously selected because there were prior women mathematicians who did well, I was kind of reverse-discrimination! I didn’t realize it at the time.

There were barriers to engineering. There were so few engineers. There was one woman engineer out of the group, in my first job. I think that women were, at that time, more accepted in the technician-level job than they were in the engineering area. I even see right now there’s still a lot of discrimination against women in the technician-level job. There are a lot of women that I know who are doing [jobs] like Sys Managers for servers, and they see it all the time: people expect young men to be doing this, not young women.

I think as far as academic life is concerned, women are much more prevalent there; but I think women have over the years agreed to work for less—because they’re usually married and have a family, so they’re willing to take less, because they like the flexibility of the timetable and the schedule. Without someone fighting against that, it’s just going to continue to happen.

Women certainly face a glass ceiling when they try to go into management. In fact, I was reading about an MBA study that was done on people who’d graduated from the Wharton School of Business. The MBA women were not moving up into becoming CIOs and CEOs of companies; they interviewed them and asked what they did, and what they did is they mostly created their own company. I believe fully that that’s because it gives them more flexibility. You see, women need flexibility in their schedule. If a child is sick, they need to be able to be there. If a family has a problem, then the mother is typically the center of the family; and that’s still the case. That has not changed much, at least as far as I can tell.

Abbate:

You also avoid the glass ceiling if it’s your own company.

Little:

Yes, you avoid the glass ceiling. You don’t even have to try to get through that if you have your own company. You have more control.

Abbate:

When I was in Silicon Valley I talked to some women there, and I got that impression.

Little:

Oh, you did?

Abbate:

They felt like you weren’t going to have as much opportunity in someone else’s company, as a woman there.

Little:

I think that’s true.

You know, women have almost always drifted towards the service kinds of jobs: the teacher jobs, the nursing jobs, the jobs that are facilitating and helping. I really never thought I would do that, because I really wanted, I guess, to be an academic type, and yet to be an engineering type, or a mathematician. I really was proud of that. My father and my uncles were all very proud of that. So I never thought I would wind up being a teacher, and at first I wasn’t proud of it. Especially after my eighth-grade practical experience, I didn’t like it at all; and then even when I taught in college, there were aspects of it I disliked a lot. And yet, there were the redeeming features of creating new material, developing work, putting material together in a form that someone could actually learn it. I really loved that part of my job. Still do! I guess I kind of fell into it because of that part of it, the creativity of it, and also the flexibility of the work; and yet I’ve stayed. So I guess I’m really a teacher.

Abbate:

What do you find most satisfying about working with computers, or in the computer field?

Little:

That’s a very hard question. If you ask a lot of our students that same question, the answer is almost like: “Obsession”; “Making it do what I want it to do.”

Abbate:

Like a power thing?

Little:

Yes, like a power thing. And there may be a little of that in me, a little of that; because I remember many times on the job, and then also even at the schools where I was teaching: if there was a problem that I couldn’t quite solve, I would think about it all the time. It would be on my mind; I would be worried about it, and worried about it, and worried about it, until: “Aha! I thought of it; I know what did that!” So, there’s a part of me that likes puzzles, and games, and challenges of that sort, and I like to always put the last piece in the last spot that fits! I guess there is somewhat of a joy in doing that.

But on the other hand, I never loved computer games. I like puzzles: crossword puzzles; word puzzles. I love history; I’ve always been a collector of all kinds of stuff. But I’m not obsessed with any little old challenge. I mean, a computer game doesn’t necessarily cause me to stop and try to figure it out. I don’t care about that much. So I don’t know what it is.

I think one of the things that really keeps me fascinated is knowing how things work inside. I have always taken such a pleasure in knowing how things work inside, and it bothers me so much when people don’t. That’s one of the reasons I worked really hard on a couple of projects with [computer] literacy. There was a literacy project in 1976; ACM and IEEE held a meeting on, “What do we need everybody to know about computing?” I attended that—along with a bunch of other folks who are now textbook writers and so on [laughs]—and we tried to figure out, “What is there about this that everyone needs to know?” Yet that got published and got promptly forgotten, and so much did not get attended to. Even when PCs came out and everybody was realizing that, “Gee, I guess I should learn to use a spreadsheet or something,” or “Maybe I should learn to use a word processor,” literacy turned to those kinds of tools and still didn’t get back to, “How does it work?” People are constantly saying, “You drive your car; you don’t have to know how it works.” Yes, but then you’re not a professional. A professional knows how it works.

So I keep promoting and pushing and pushing for that, and when this most recent report came out about information technology fluency, I was really all excited about it, and went to one of the ACM workshops on it, and started promoting it, because I think that should be in education. The contents of that does include a lot of the applications stuff and does include a lot of the fluff, but it also includes, “How does it work?”

Abbate:

And this is an ACM report?

Little:

No, it’s a National Research Council report, and it came out about three years ago. [National Research Council (NRC) Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Being Fluent with Information Technology. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999.] It’s just now becoming known to states, and so our State of Maryland, through the USM System, has authorized every campus to tell us, “How are you doing fluency?” Unfortunately, most campuses think that it’s the same thing as “information literacy.”

Abbate:

So this is supposed to be a step up from literacy?

Little:

It’s a step different from literacy. Information literacy, done by the Library Association, is like the old orientation, where you learn to use the library to look things up; you learn to find things, except now you do it on the Web. Information literacy is finding things, processing things, and doing things, but it is not how anything works. It’s not even necessarily how to use a spreadsheet. It’s a totally different tack. Information technology fluency, which kind of replaces what we used to call “computer literacy,” I think is a very important movement that should be considered by all levels of academia: high school as well as college level. Fitting it into an already-crowded curriculum is not necessarily going to be easy. But as a result of not having that kind of fluency, what you see is students who are trying to use computers—and not just to do Internet searching, because that pretty much has been accepted; every library’s going to be doing that—but you see them using computers, and they don’t even know the difference between “I’m storing something on my hard drive, I’m storing something on my floppy, I’m storing something on the zip”; and they don’t know the difference between that and the memory. So I think those kinds of “How does it work?” information are really simple—abstract, but simple—that every computer user really needs to know, in order to do it more efficiently and more effectively. Even though not every driver knows how their engine works!

Abbate:

But you know something about the engine.

Little:

Yes. You know when you run out of gas, because the gauge tells you. You know when it sounds wrong; you learn how it sounds! [both laugh] I don’t think enough people know about how things are working on the inside to really be as effective as they could be in being users.

The biggest thing that worries me, and the thing that I guess I’m most concerned about, is the impact on society. You know, the technological impact on society is enormous—and it’s a reactive-law situation, where you don’t have a law until something happens, and then you react to it by creating a law. So we don’t necessarily plan ahead very well, as a society. Even if we did, we’d try to restrict some things from being used in certain ways, and then there’d be groups complaining about that, so we almost just have to live with this reactive nature. That’s a concern to me for the future.

Abbate:

It would be good to have some more enlightened policy making.

Little:

Yes, it would be. We need a more enlightened policy level.

Abbate:

It sounds like you had a lot of role models or mentors. You’ve mentioned teachers and people you worked with. Is that important to you? Do you try and do it yourself?

Little:

Oh, yes! Yes, it’s very important; and I think today none of us do it as well as we used to.

Abbate:

What do you mean?

Little:

Life is too busy; life is too hurried; life is too rushed. Even teachers I know who really would like the idea of being mentors to their students: they try to be mentors to the students that are in their classes, but they’re not necessarily thinking of “How they helped me get here, where I am.” I do think that you owe—especially when you’re growing up, and you’re coming through the channels—you owe a lot to the people who tipped you off to this, or tipped you off to that, or who pointed the way, or who made a suggestion along the way. I think a lot of us do that, especially in our classes, but I don’t think we find enough ways outside of our classes to do it.

You can do it through groups like the Association for Women in Computing; there’s lots of opportunity to do it there, because you’re constantly meeting people who just really want to get in and want to do stuff. But typically at meetings of ACM, for example, and even some of the business-oriented groups, those people are already in the field; they’re not looking to get into the field. So working with student groups is a good way to do it. And we need to have better-educated teachers along the way. For example, my high school math teacher: he didn’t push me towards computing, which was in future, but he pushed me towards a love of the field and the challenges that it holds and the kinds of problems you could solve, which is fascinating to me. So our teachers back in the tenth grade, eleventh grades: those need to be in that role. And now, even with little children, ten or eleven years old: they are already using computers, and so often they could be pointed in a direction or two, depending on their interests and their talent. Or at least they could be told, “Well, you really need to study math, if you want to go into this.”

I think it’s something that is not as influential as it should be. I think it should be a much bigger part. Most people can remember their first-grade teacher, and even their fourth-grade teacher, by name: most people. And when you look back over your history of “Who do you remember? Who turned you in a certain direction?”—well, that’s being a mentor!

Abbate:

I have a couple more general questions.

Does it seem to you that women are more likely to end up in certain areas of computing?

Little:

I used to think that in the 1960s and 1970s era, most women—including almost all of IBM’s women—were in the area of servicing the customer, because their people skills are so much better than some of the men. IBM really hired a slew of women in the sixties and put them in these sys programming jobs, and they dealt with the customer on a one-on-one basis. “What are your needs?” and “What can I get for you?” and “What are the things I can do for you?” They also had to have some technical expertise. For a while there, it looked like that’s where the women would be. The women of the earlier eras had been wiring the boards and doing the technician-level stuff, and then many of them became programmers, and there was a time when programming was supposed to be technician-level stuff. That changed as languages changed.

Women tend, it seems to me, to want to go into systems analysis, requirements analysis—the kinds of work that is dealing with people—and probably are less likely to go into the jobs that are behind the scenes, like network manager. But the ones I know who are network managers are excellent! They’re really good. So if they ever get a craving for that, or they ever get a taste of that and like it, I think they can do well in it. I don’t think there’s anything that would prevent them from doing it. They’re just using a different side of their brain, perhaps! [laughs] And not all women have these people skills that people talk about. There are women who are extremely shy, and who are a lot more laid-back, and who don’t necessarily welcome being in public every day. So it takes all kinds. In fact, I know men who really love that kind of work—dealing with people—much more than being behind the scenes every day. So I guess it’s a hard question to answer!

Abbate:

Within academic computer science, is there any sort of noticeable clustering? Or are people just spread around?

Little:

Within academic computer science, it’s mostly men; and it’s many men from foreign countries.

Abbate:

Even in your department? How many women are there?

Little:

Out of the twenty-five or so tenure-track people, there are maybe three.

Abbate:

Wow.

Little:

One just left, so I guess now it’s two. Among the visiting faculty, we have a new phenomenon that’s been occurring. When you can’t be given tenure-track positions, you get given visiting positions; and in most university departments, those visiting positions go to someone honored or someone high-level who comes in for a year to be there on a sabbatical. But what has happened at schools like ours is that we have now got ten to twelve positions called “Visiting” positions for people who don’t have degrees—who are not even close to having degrees, many of them—because we simply don’t have enough teachers to teach the courses.

Abbate:

That’s interesting. And those are more women?

Little:

There are three women among those. The wife of one of [the other Visiting Professors]; the one who was our Lab Assistant, who’s just finished her master’s [degree]; and one who’s from a community college, who hasn’t started a Doctorate. So I guess there’s three among those ten who are Visiting. But they like that position, because they have more flexibility with their schedule, and one of them has two or three children at home. So it’s understandable how they would enjoy that position: they’re getting a lot of good experience and they’re learning about an academic department—even though they would not be considered for a tenure-track position because they don’t have a Doctorate.

There is still a predominance of men in both math and computer science, and they are, many of them, people who have come to this country as immigrants, or who have come to study and then stayed. There was a study once that Betty Vetter did; she was at CPST, the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. She did a study, as Director of that Commission, on how people get into the field: where they come from, how they get into the field, and what they’ve concentrated on and done. Her conclusion was that there are a wide variety of jobs that range from technical to associate professional to professional, and that most of the folks who have targeted those positions are not necessarily being accepted into the field—the community college students especially. Her study included a lot of people who had gotten into the field by means of coming here as either immigrants or as foreign students to study; and her study showed that the drop-off in the field was mostly women. When the field fell in 1985, and all of a sudden the number of graduates just plummeted, that’s when we lost the women from our student body; and that if we had not had the immigrants who stayed, we would have been in a really bad situation. So her strong advocacy was: We need to encourage students to study from other countries, and we need to try to keep them.

Abbate:

As opposed to getting the women back?

Little:

No, she was also encouraging us to get the women back somehow, but she didn’t have an explanation for why that drop-off occurred. There’s been two or three things written about that since, that gave one reason or another about that. But she had brought out the fact that without the immigrant population that comes and stays, our science and technology would be in terrible shape.

Abbate:

Do you think computer jobs, or the field in general, have become less open to women? Has that changed over time since you’ve started? Was there sort of an up and down?

Little:

I think on the whole, mainly due to a lot of the Equal Opportunity laws and pushing to get a population that is more broad, that both bringing in minorities and bringing in women has occurred. I think that there are openings, and that people would welcome them. I think we have only had a few specific places to target to try to educate the minority population, like some of the historically black schools have done. I know the Community College of Baltimore, before I left, had become 75 percent minority population, and some of the graduates were beginning to be really strongly a minority population. So a lot of those who went into the field with a two-year degree came from there; very few from some of the other community colleges around in the counties—although I think that’s changing now, too, because I think now the other community colleges are admitting more minorities than they did before.

So, no: I think it is becoming more open. The opportunities are there, but the demands are greater. You have to know more now today than you did earlier, and you have to choose your specialty sooner—which is a problem. You know, if you have a breadth of knowledge, then you can’t go out there and pass the Novell Network Test; but isn’t a breadth of knowledge better than being able to do one little thing in one particular brand and type? Many people feel, “Oh, I’m going to go learn one specialty, and I’m going to be expert and sit there for the rest of my life.” Well, what I would really like to see is some research studies on the future path of those folks who are doing those specialty things. Do they really get promotions? Do they really move up? Do they ever finish a degree—or not? That has not been answered. There’s been very little research on those; about the only data you can get is from the vendor themselves, which you don’t necessarily think you can trust! It’s a big question.

Education still tries to give a broader base, but even there you have to specialize a little bit. You have to choose if you’re going to take data communications and networking–type specialties, as opposed to Web development–type specialties, as opposed to software engineering specialties. Even among our college seniors, we have people trying to pick and choose what they think will be most helpful to them on the job; and they don’t know which of those jobs they’re going to get!

Abbate:

Do you think that works against women specifically? That they’re less inclined to specialize, or that that doesn’t appeal to them as much?

Little:

Probably. Yes, I think women probably in general don’t tend to specialize as quickly as men. I don’t know; I don’t have any hard data to prove that! [laughs] Just intuition.

Abbate:

Do they drop out of the program more, in terms of undergraduate enrollment?

Little:

Yes. They drop at CS 1 and 2. Mostly CS 2.

Abbate:

More women than men?

Little:

More women drop out. It’s been my experience that more women drop out, and that that is in fact one of our bottleneck courses. You look at the curriculum, at which courses they can’t get through. For one thing, we have ambiguous requirements for entering the major. Most schools just say, “You must have had a programming course somewhere.” Well, high school programming is so wide in variety that you don’t know what they’ve had, and so a lot of universities want to say, “We’re going to guard the gate. We’re only going to let experts through.” So their first course becomes a bottleneck. In many cases it’s not a helpful course as much as it is a “Show me what you know” kind of course.

I think there really needs to be improvement in the skills students have at entry level to college, and having a really strong high school program would do that, because it would give everybody more of an opportunity to gain what they need to know in order to succeed as a freshman. I think that’s really a problem, and I do think that women tend to get more discouraged at that than men. A lot of the programs that are called CIS and that are called IS (Info-Systems) have more women in them than does computer science, and I think that’s the result of a heavy emphasis on programming at the freshman year.

Abbate:

That’s interesting, because some school in Britain was telling me they had a course and they changed the name from Computer Science to Information Systems, but nothing else was changed, and they got twice as many women . . .

Little:

Oh my gosh!

Abbate:

. . . just by changing the name! So it wasn’t the content; it was the image, somehow.

Little:

It was the image! Was the course like CS 1, which is introductory programming, or was it a broad breadth-of-the-field–type course?

Abbate:

I’d have to look at my notes, because I can’t remember the specifics, but it definitely had some technical content. They realized that the women were being turned off by something that was more image than reality.

Little:

I see.

Abbate:

I’m trying to figure out what is going on.

Little:

Oh, a lot of women—even women who are graduating now, in my sophomore and junior class—will tell you, “I’ve loved all these courses, except the programming. I don’t want to be a programmer all day, every day. I do want to do some of these other kinds of jobs.” They really enjoy knowing what the breadth of the field is like, because then they say, “Oh, there’s a job I would really love!” And we do need all types; we don’t need just programmers, we need all types.

I think that many women, if they got that information early—like in a sophomore-level course: “Introduction to the Discipline” or “Introduction to the Field”; and if it’s a broad, general course—would maybe continue. But when the first course they take is programming, especially with mathematical formulas and in a very rigid way, like many of the CS 1’s are—not everywhere are they like that, just some places I guess—then I think that really is too narrow for them.

Abbate:

Maybe if we could give them the message that “You have to master this, but it doesn’t have to be your . . .”

Little:

“. . . whole life.” Right!

Abbate:

“This is just one thing you need to know, and it doesn’t have to be your career.”

Little:

Right. That would be a good message to impart. “You need to know about this, but you don’t necessarily have to do this eight hours a day every day. Knowing this is required for you to do the other kinds of jobs.”

Abbate:

It’s like pre-meds. They get these weed-out organic chemistry courses and stuff, and they all hate it, but they know that being a doctor isn’t studying organic chemistry . . .

Little:

. . . all day, every day.

Abbate:

Once you’re a doctor, you don’t have to it at all, really. So they understand the relation between the training and the practice in a way that I don’t think people studying computing do. Because some people do, obviously, do programming. But I think there are some people who get the sense that, “Oh, if I don’t want to spend my life doing this, then there’s no room for me.”

Little:

Right. [With doctors,] they realize that it’s a lot of specialties, and yet there’s a balance. When they get out there, they’re going to be a doctor, not necessarily continuing to do all that they did in their courses. Somehow, we need to get that word across.

Career advice, closing remarks

Abbate:

Yes.

Do you have any advice for young women who might be thinking about going into computer science?

Little:

It’s an exciting place to be! I really think young women would have a good time in it, and would enjoy it and have lots of opportunities, no matter what their major interest is. I think a lot women—certainly those who are strong in mathematics—would have a lot of opportunities open to them; but even some of those who are not so strong in mathematics would find things that they would enjoy doing. Artists, for example! There are lots of creative types of positions in the field.

One thing, I think, to watch for is the changing of all the names. It’s interesting how we’ve evolved, and names become out of date and old fashioned. “Data processing” was what this was called when it was record-keeping for business, and it was mostly punch-cards; but it became “CIS” when the computers started participating in the process; then it became “info systems”; and of course, throughout we’ve all used the word “computing,” or “computers,” because that’s the foundation of it. You have to have a computer in order to have any of these things working, including your cell phone. But over time, even the word “computing,” to a large part of our discipline, has fallen into disrespect! “I don’t want to be in computing. I want to be in information technology!” Well, then what does that mean? That’s a different word, but is it different? Aren’t they part of all the same thing? Terminology can really be important to students’ knowing what it is they want. If they don’t know the term and they don’t the definition of the term, then how are they going to know what they’re in and what they want? Even a lot of these jobs that are in mass communications—look at radio, television, movies; entertainment business; all those people who call themselves “graphic designers”—aren’t they really computer people? Of course they are! All those folks who do the special effects for the movies: aren’t they computer people? Of course they are! Well, what do you call them? They’re not necessarily called “computing,” but they are doing computing.

I think we’re going to see a merging of a lot of these applications, so that computing is just going to become a part of almost everything. Who knows, in thirty or forty years, what all this will be called? I mean, there have been those who said that the computer’s going to disappear; it’ll be everywhere, and you won’t necessarily even know it’s there. So maybe we will be called something else. I guess that’s what I’m getting around to. [laughs] So, my advice for students: Look ahead!

Abbate:

Well, thank you very much for speaking with me at such length!

Little:

Thank you!