Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well, my name is Susan Gerhart and that “beep, beep, beep” which you just heard was Sputnik,
which was launched October 4, 1957. And I’d like to entitle this segment for the oral
history computer educator’s program that Sputnik launched my career. And I’d also
like to thank Barbara and Vicki, who helped so much with this project. Well, I was a teenager
in 1957, in high school, and certainly Sputnik, as we all know it, rattled the country because
the United States didn’t know how much missile capacity the Russians had. But Sputnik certainly
changed that picture. And the responses to Sputnik are what are really important for
my career, I think for the computing field, and for many of our careers. One example there
is that soon after Sputnik was launched, that DARPA was created. And of course DARPA led
to the Internet, which we couldn’t live without now; certainly changed many, many
lives there. When I was in high school after Sputnik, it seemed like the math and the science
professors actually became rock stars. There was so much attention toward getting more
emphasis on math and science in the high schools, getting more students coming out of the high
school programs and going in to engineering and science careers. I had the opportunity
in 1961 to attend a National Science Foundation Summer Institute in Illinois. And that’s
where I met my first computer. It was an IBM 650, you know, this big with the panel of
blinking lights and card punch; it was a bi-quinary system. We learned programming, you know,
very simple programs, probably in a FORTRAN dialect at that time, and it simply hooked
me that we could write in just a few lines of code something that would sum up the numbers
say from one to … a thousand numbers, or a million numbers. Or we could sum and do
statistics. Very simple calculations, but it was the essence of programming that we
learned at that time. Now, it wasn’t just that we could come up with a calculated answer
to a question but also what launched my research career was that how did we know we had the
right answer to that question. And so that’s what led me later on into mathematical induction
and proving properties of programs, analysis of software, and testing. So after that experience
with the IBM 650, I was really hooked on computing but there wasn’t any computer science at
that time. So I was a math major at Ohio Wesleyan University in Ohio near where I grew up. There,
a far-sighted math professor, Robert Wilson, got the university to wire an IBM 1620, which
was again card punch, but it had a typewriter output. And we programmed quite a lot in our
math courses during the courses that we took, but we had no specific computing courses.
Because there were few math majors, I actually had so many hours I could put in on that IBM
1620, it was almost like a personal computer for me at that time. And my senior project
was a compiler in a dialect of FORTRAN that I developed. Also, during that summer …
the summers in my high school … or my college period, we taught courses and I tutored high
school teachers. Again, these were National Science Foundation Summer Institutes for high
school teachers to get exposed to what was called then the New Math. Now, I think we’d
call it discrete math. And for me, that was a lot more interesting than calculus; to learn
logic and reasoning. And I had a philosophy of science course where we studied induction.
And again, that influenced my career later on in terms of research. And then later, I
was delighted to have the opportunity to teach discrete math and databases and related material.
So the National Science Foundation responding to Sputnik produced many different events
that influenced my career specifically and, I think, a lot of other people as well. Now,
I’ve wondered what would have happened if, in fact, the United States had been first
instead of Russia. How might events have occurred? And why, in fact, did the United States not
get a satellite up there first? And reading a little history, here’s what it looked
like. That both the United States and Russia were competing, but also cooperating in an
international geophysical year. So the intention was that later on, in about that time period,
1957, 1958, satellites would be launched for scientific purposes. The Russians proceeded
along that path and did launch. The United States got interested more in — particularly
led by President Eisenhower’s concern about missiles — into a U2 program and the military
got interested in having more satellites that had cameras. Now if you’ve got satellites
with cameras but you don’t have telemetry, you also have to worry about how you get the
film and the images back to Earth. So they were interested … they were producing a
much more complicated satellite, then the Russians launched a very simple Sputnik that
just did its own “beep, beep, beep.” Now, it’s a quirk of history, but what … I
think it’s something to think about: What would have happened if the United States had
been first? Would we have just, you know, kind of sat back? Or was it so important to
have that stimulus that we really emphasized math and science in a way then that had a
big effect. Maybe, now, what we need is something in — Tom Friedman from the New York Times
suggested this the other day — that there’s another Sputnik coming; another country launching
green technology or leap-frogging the United States in a way that might produce the same
effects as Sputnik. So, for me, Sputnik launched my career and I would urge you to go back
and read about that, that time where science and math really was important and so much
progress was being made. So thank you.