Oral history interview with Jean M. Baker

Abstract

Jean Baker attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in electrical engineering with an emphasis on digital design. The summer of 1980 she worked for Honeywell (St. Louis Park, MN) on ring laser gyroscopes. Graduating in 1981 she took a job in the defense systems division of Sperry Rand, working in Eagan, Minnesota, to develop computers for the US Navy. Her technical work focused on gate arrays for input-output cards, including the UYK-43 computer. After working part-time while raising small children, she moved to a new job at LSI Logic (1995-2009) working on ASICs for IBM, HP, Lexmark, and Seagate then moving into management.

This material is based on work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation award B2014-07 “Tripling Women’s Participation in Computing (1965-1985).”