As a senior in high school in 1975, I enrolled in an elective drafting class where I became the male instructor’s first ever female student. I loved isometric drawing. Learning to draw volumes using straight lines and ellipses proved to be valuable later in understanding Cezanne’s dictum: “Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.”

My drawings and grades qualified me for a paid summer internship in an engineering department of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a leader in the burgeoning mini-computer industry. However, the teacher said, “A girl should not take the place of a boy who will need to earn a living. Boys need to provide for families. Girls can draw well because they have thin fingers.” The job was given to a boy named Doug.

My parents protested to a vice principal who feigned helplessness. My mother, an employee at DEC, arranged for me to be hired into the Temporary Assistant Group (TAG) secretarial pool. I worked in a variety of desk jobs in accounting and reception, stacked books in a library and sorted parts in a warehouse before being hired two years later as a technical illustrator in Digital’s Educational Publishing Group. There I learned to design and illustrate instructional books, several of them winning technical publishing awards.

LEFT: From Eniac to Univac: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers, with the complete First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC by John von Neumann, by Nancy Stern, Digital Press, 1981

BELOW: Fig 12 & 13, From Eniac to Univac, Digital Press, 1981