Education
Vassar College.
Vassar College.
She joined the FORTRAN team at International Business Machines Corporation, which was led by John Backus, upon graduation from Vassar College. They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills-- bridge players, chess players, even women. Lois Haibt was lured to International Business Machines Corporation after graduating from Vassar, where she did well in mathematics and science, by a starting salary of $5,100, nearly twice the offer from Bell Laboratories.
"They told me it was a job programming computers," she said.
"I only had a vague idea what that was. But I figured it must be something interesting and challenging, if they were going to pay me all that money."
"lieutenant was the kind of atmosphere where if you couldn’t see what was wrong with your program, you would just turn to the next person," she recalled.
"Number one was worried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her code. We were all just learning together."
Lois Haibt was tasked with writing the computer module that analyzed the flow control from the part of the compiler that collected information about the program to be compiled and calculated the frequency with which the basic blocks of the program would be executed, using Monte Carlo methods.
She worked for years as a systems analyst and researcher for Yorktown Heights International Business Machines Corporation Research Laboratory, where her work included working on visualization of program structure using a program she developed to draw multilevel flow charts.
In later years, she worked in the analysis of Petri nets and generating programs from them.
Quotations: "They told me it was a job programming computers,".
She was the only female member of the team
