Oral history interview with Ann S. Kaufman

Abstract

Ann Kaufman graduated from an all-girls academic high school, then took a bachelor’s degree in math from Queens College (CUNY) with a Regent’s Scholarship and then a master’s degree in math from Duke University. After teaching mathematics at a junior high school for three years, she took her first computer science courses at Staten Island College where an instructor arranged an interview with Bell Labs. Hired at Bell she took a master’s in computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology. She relates her experiences on assignment at Bell Southern, an operating company, and her subsequent Bell Labs work in programming, systems engineering, product management, and systems integration. She then traveled extensively in helping internationalize AT&T's Unix system, and then worked in different capacities for Novell and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), after they successively bought the Unix division. She returned to Lucent Technologies then Avaya, doing project management for several data centers. Then, after a post-2001 hiatus, she returned to project-management and consulting work for Diageo (the drinks conglomerate). She offers thoughts on outsourcing and professional entrance in the IT workforce.

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