During college between academic years, I worked as a book illustrator in a publishing department at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an international computer company.

In my senior year of high school, in 1975, I had enrolled in an elective drafting class becoming the male instructor’s first ever female student. I loved isometric drawing. Learning to draw 3-D illusions using straight lines and ellipses proved to be invaluable later when I encountered Cezanne’s dictum: “Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.”

The drawings I made in the drafting class qualified me for a paid summer internship in an engineering department at Digital. However, despite strenuous parental protest to the high school vice principal, the training opportunity was given to a boy in class named Doug because, the teacher said, “Boys will marry and need to provide for families. A girl should not deprive a boy of his need to earn a living. Girls can hold mechanical pencils because they have thin fingers.”

So my mother, who worked at Digital, arranged for me to be hired into the Temporary Assistants Group (TAG) secretarial pool. I spent two summers working administrative jobs in accounting, reception, a library and a warehouse before being hired by Digital’s Educational Publishing Group as a technical illustrator. There I learned to design and illustrate instructional books, winning many technical publishing awards.

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