Oral history interview with Lonni J. Wersal

Abstract

Lonni Wersal graduated from Highland Park High School in 1975, then took an entry-level clerical position at Sperry in Eagan, Minnesota, in 1977. With her manager’s encouragement, she took programming classes at St. Paul Vo-Tech. She subsequently worked in a variety of positions, as administrator for software engineering for UYK-20 (1981-89), as technical and programmatic support for several Navy projects including Aegis (1989-94), and as product manager for the Q-70 program (1994-2002), one of the Navy’s first Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) projects. She describes reporting requirements to the Navy during the several corporate transitions (Unisys to Lockheed Martin) as well as her move to Dahlgren, Virginia, in 2002 to work at a Navy Aegis program office. She discusses informal networks of women at Lockheed Martin.

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