Seibel: The way you contributed technically to the PTRAN project, it
sounds like you had the big architectural picture of how the whole thing was
going to work and could point out the bits that it wasn’t clear how they
were going to work.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Do you think that ability was something that you had early on, or
did that develop over time?
Allen: I think it came partially out of growing up on a farm. If one looks at a
lot of the interesting engineering things that happened in our field—in this
era or a little earlier—an awful lot of them come from farm kids. I stumbled
on this from some of the people that I worked with in the National
Academy of Engineering—a whole bunch of these older men came from
Midwestern farms. And they got very involved with designing rockets and
other very engineering and systemy and hands-on kinds of things. I think
that being involved with farms and nature, I had a great interest in, how
does one fix things and how do things work?
Seibel: And a farm is a big system of inputs and outputs.
Allen: Right. And since it’s very close to nature, it has its own cycles, its
own system that you can do nothing about. So one finds a place in it, and it’s
a very comfortable one.
-- Turing Award-winning computer scientist Fran Allen interviewed in Peter Seibel’s Coders At Work, p507
(This is a great book, by the way. I strongly recommend it to anyone whose work involves how computers do what they do.)
Seibel: The way you contributed technically to the PTRAN project, it sounds like you had the big architectural picture of how the whole thing was going to work and could point out the bits that it wasn’t clear how they were going to work.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Do you think that ability was something that you had early on, or did that develop over time?
Allen: I think it came partially out of growing up on a farm. If one looks at a lot of the interesting engineering things that happened in our field—in this era or a little earlier—an awful lot of them come from farm kids. I stumbled on this from some of the people that I worked with in the National Academy of Engineering—a whole bunch of these older men came from Midwestern farms. And they got very involved with designing rockets and other very engineering and systemy and hands-on kinds of things. I think that being involved with farms and nature, I had a great interest in, how does one fix things and how do things work?
Seibel: And a farm is a big system of inputs and outputs.
Allen: Right. And since it’s very close to nature, it has its own cycles, its own system that you can do nothing about. So one finds a place in it, and it’s a very comfortable one.
-- Turing Award-winning computer scientist Fran Allen interviewed in Peter Seibel’s Coders At Work, p507
(This is a great book, by the way. I strongly recommend it to anyone whose work involves how computers do what they do.)