Oral history interview with Judith Kinsey

Abstract

Judith Kinsey grew up in southern Minnesota and graduated from Wellesley College in 1962. She applied to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but also took the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test (PAT) and received a job offer from the Minneapolis branch office. She received extensive corporate training especially in the first years of her work. As a System Engineer she supported IBM sales in the manufacturing area, working out of the Minneapolis and St. Paul branch offices. With the coming of the System/360 she helped install these at customers’ locations by doing assembly-language and other programming. While raising children she was out of the workforce during 1970-76 then returned to IBM as Staff Programmer at Rochester, Minnesota, and then moved into management in 1980. She describes programming assignments, college recruiting, gender relations, and Rochester’s distinctive work culture. During development of the AS/400, she was Technical Assistant to the Directory of the Programming Lab at Rochester. In 1995 she took a position at IBM corporate (in Somers NY) and experienced the re-engineering of IBM under Louis Gerstner. She adds descriptions of efforts to encourage Girl Scouts in computing.

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