Come with Me, or I’ll Go by Myself

 SANDRA KURTZIG

While protests blazed at Stanford in 1969, alumna Sandy Kurtzig was three thousand miles away. She and her new husband were working at the Bell Labs campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs was renowned as the “idea factory” where the laser, the transistor, and radio astronomy had been invented. But up close, Kurtzig thought, the place looked like a prison. Designed to encourage scientists and engineers from various disciplines to cross paths, the campus comprised a series of featureless, low, rectangular buildings veined with long hallways—the one in the physics wing stretched nearly the length of two blocks—and punctuated with tall narrow windows. The buildings lined up. The windows lined up. The grass was clipped as short as the senior researchers’ hair. The roads that ringed the isolated complex were nearly empty.¹

Kurtzig’s husband, Arie, who was working on computer memory chips for Bell Labs, flashed his badge at the guard.^II Kurtzig waved the pass that proclaimed her a “resident visitor.” She had been coming to Bell Labs nearly every day for four months. Not too long ago, she had noticed an empty cubicle and claimed it. Now everyone considered it hers.

Kurtzig did not work for Bell Labs. She sold computers made by General Electric to the scientists and researchers at Bell Labs. More precisely, she sold time on a time-sharing system run by General Electric.

Time-sharing computers had given Bob Taylor his insight, back in 1966, that computers could build communities. A single time-sharing machine switched among users, usually connected to the computer via dedicated phone lines, so quickly that each user was unaware of sharing the computer with the others.

In 1966, most time-sharing systems were at universities or defense-related companies. But now, three years later, time-sharing computers had become a $70 million business, doubling in size every year.² More than fifty companies competed in the market, including giants such as Kurtzig’s employer, General Electric, which had a 40 percent market share.³ Time-sharing companies developed programming languages and applications and sold remote access to powerful computers to businesses that did not want to buy or lease a computer of their own. Customers rented terminals and paid to use software, store data, and connect to the machine.

Competition was fierce. A month after General Electric ran a print ad asking “Would you like to access a million-dollar computer?,” IBM (with a 20 percent market share through its Service Bureau Corporation subsidiary) countered with its own question: “Would you like to access a five-million-dollar computer?”⁴

Bell Labs had subscribed to GE’s time-sharing service before Kurtzig began her sales position, but the terminals scattered around the campus often sat unused. Researchers either sent their problems to be run on a mainframe, using the same punch-card batch processing that had frustrated Taylor years earlier, or did the calculations themselves, at their desks. Kurtzig’s job was to convince the Bell Labs researchers that the unimpressive-looking time-sharing terminals—they resembled overgrown beige typewriters—were useful tools. Every minute that she could convince the scientists to spend on the time-sharing system meant more money for General Electric.

Kurtzig, bright and strikingly attractive, was great at the job. Only twenty-one, she had been working with computers since she was a seventeen-year-old UCLA sophomore with a part-time job in the computer center. By her junior year, she was paying for her classes as a numerical analyst in the fluid physics department of the aerospace company TRW. There, in effect, she had been the computer. A math major, she had run calculations for the group of fifteen aerospace engineers. For complex problems, she would use TRW’s giant mainframe computer, but she, like Taylor, hated waiting weeks for answers.

When TRW bought a GE time-sharing machine, Kurtzig began writing programs for it in BASIC, thrilled by the instant feedback.^I It had taken only a few weeks of working with the new computer for her to decide, as she later put it, that “computers would be a part of my future.”⁵

But not immediately. After graduating from UCLA at twenty, and with the encouragement of the engineers at TRW, she had begun studies in a graduate program in aerospace engineering. Her parents, with whom she had lived in their Beverly Hills home while she attended UCLA, forbade her to even consider Berkeley, with its radicals and sit-ins—so she went to Stanford. She was one of seven women among the nearly eight hundred graduate engineering students spread across eleven departments.⁶

Handicapped by not having studied engineering as an undergraduate, Kurtzig spent most of her time at Stanford on her classwork. (“I’m not a genius,” she says today, “but I know how to work very, very hard.”) The campus protests that disrupted Niels Reimers’s efforts to launch a licensing office were background noise for Kurtzig. When she was not studying, she spent time with her boyfriend, Arie, then finishing his PhD under Nobel Laureate William Shockley, the same Shockley who had launched a company around the transistor he had coinvented and then hired the eight young men who would leave to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley had not yet fully descended into the paranoia and eugenic fervor that would later mar his reputation. (He would declare blacks intellectually inferior to whites and donate his sperm with the stipulation that it be used only by a female member of Mensa.) Nonetheless, he struck Sandy Kurtzig, even then, as a “weird duck.”⁷

When Kurtzig moved to New Jersey to be with Arie after they married, the young couple made a deal: they would live in New Jersey for three years. After that, if she was unhappy, they would return to California, where her family lived and which she loved.

Kurtzig had gotten the GE sales position after she arrived unannounced at the company’s Teaneck, New Jersey, office and waited for hours, résumé in hand, until the district manager agreed to talk to her. The manager undoubtedly knew that GE’s time-sharing unit had a program in place to recruit women into sales. By the time Kurtzig went into his office, half the national sales team were women.⁸ Kurtzig’s master’s degree in aerospace engineering and her enthusiasm for the GE time-sharing computer that she had used years before at TRW impressed the manager. Before she even left his office, he hired her to sell to Bell Labs.

Bell Labs was a strange place. Kurtzig recalls watching one scientist, lost in his own head, bump into a water fountain, beg its pardon, and keep going without realizing he had apologized to an inanimate object. But for Kurtzig, who had spent her short adulthood in academic math and engineering departments, Bell Labs had a familiar feel. Although most of the other women she saw at the Murray Hill facility worked in administrative roles or the cafeteria, Kurtzig never doubted that she belonged. She had even turned down a job offer from Bell Labs when she graduated from Stanford, not because she felt that she would be out of place but because she could have fit in so well, just another master’s-level engineering drone serving the kingdom of science PhDs. She had wanted to stand out more.

Her sales strategy at Bell Labs was simple, as she recalls: “Walk around the halls and ask, ‘Can I help you with your problems?’ ”⁹

Many people thought not. Kurtzig was selling computers, and computers meant mainframes, and mainframes meant setting up a meeting with one of Bell Labs’ full-time programmers, talking through the steps and calculations necessary to solve a problem, and then waiting weeks for the programmer to write a program and the mainframe to run it.

“This is different,” she explained. She asked about current projects and offered to demonstrate how a program, accessible through the terminal, could help. There were time-sharing programs for statistical analysis, graph plotting, and complex data processing.

Why wait for Bell Labs’s staff of programmers when you can do it yourself? she would ask. Why wait for the mainframe computer housed in a different building to chug through its cards, when this terminal next to your desk spits out results almost as soon as you input the data? If a researcher needed a program that did not exist, Kurtzig helped him write a new one.

She was good. “Soon dozens of Murray Hill R&Ders were burning time on their machines while I fed the flames,” she recalled.¹⁰ She loved that she was doing her job, and earning her commission, so well, and it also excited her to know that she was bringing Bell Labs into the era of modern computing.

When she got a call telling her to report to her boss’s office in Teaneck, she was so energized and nervous—wasn’t it too early for a bonus?—that for good luck she paid the toll of the car behind her on the New Jersey Turnpike.¹¹

Her turnpike altruism had no effect. Her boss greeted her and with little preamble announced that he was taking her off the Bell Labs account. When she asked why, he explained that the mainframe computer at Bell Labs that Kurtzig had been weaning scientists away from was manufactured and maintained by General Electric—and the behemoth made much more money for the company than the time-sharing minutes she had been selling with such zeal. If Bell Labs used the mainframe less, how could GE make the case for upgrading to a newer, more expensive machine? Moreover, the programmers at Bell Labs had not been pleased that Kurtzig had been helping researchers write their own programs. (“Solve your problems yourself” was a key phrase in Kurtzig’s sales pitch.)¹² Programming was a job for professionals.

Kurtzig was stunned. How could she be punished for doing her job too well?

Angry (GE should have told her about the mainframe!), embarrassed (she should have asked!), and suspicious (had they put her on the account because they thought the pretty young woman couldn’t sell anything anyway?), she felt her throat thickening. But she willed herself not to cry in front of the district manager. She could cry later—and she did—but for now she remembered her mother’s oft-repeated mantra: “When in doubt, act confident.”¹³

What happens next? she asked, hoping that she was not fired.

She was assigned to a new sales territory, with prospective customers that could not be more different from the PhDs at the citadel of science that was Bell Labs. She would cover north central New Jersey, a region of factories, machine shops, smokestacks, catwalks, and motors. The last place anyone would expect to find a computer.

Kurtzig proved herself in her new role. She convinced a company called General Foam that a GE time-sharing computer could help maximize the number of sponges pressed from the giant foam sheets the company processed. She sold time-sharing services to the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck after demonstrating how GE’s statistical analysis and graphing programs could help correlate data from clinical trials and lab tests.

Kurtzig was an anomaly twice over: she was a woman selling to factory owners, and she was a sales representative with programming knowledge. But most of her customers had never before had anything to do with computers, so they had few expectations. The sales rep was a woman? Okay. Maybe that was just the way it was done.

By the end of her third year in New Jersey, Kurtzig was a success at work but terribly homesick. Aside from her job, she liked nothing about New Jersey: not the muggy summers, not the frigid winters, not the apartment so close to the railroad tracks that the trains seemed to drive through her bedroom, not the three thousand miles between her and her parents and younger brother.

She had done what she had promised Arie: she had tried it for three years. Now she was finished. She wanted to ask GE for a transfer to California, and Arie, with his Stanford doctorate and his résumé with Bell Labs on the top line, could find a job, too. With the rent they were paying for the noisy nutshell apartment in New Jersey, they could get a nice two-bedroom in a quiet neighborhood in then cheaper California.

But Arie did not want to move. She pushed. He was adamant. At one point, she was so frustrated after one of their fights that she fled the tiny apartment, turning around just long enough to tell her husband, “I’m going back to California. You can come with me, or I’ll go by myself.”¹⁴

The next day, he gave in, and the couple went to a New York City newsstand that sold the Sunday editions of the major newspapers from San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, and Los Angeles. The Sunday papers always had the biggest help wanted sections.

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I. Kurtzig does not recall if she taught herself BASIC from a book or had taken a course at UCLA. She already knew FORTRAN.

II. Arie Kurtzig’s particular focus was bubble memory, which uses small magnetized areas to represent data bits.