The Code by Margaret O'Mara

Author:Margaret O'Mara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

THE CALIFORNIAN INVASION

Steve Jobs still might be getting all the press, but there were close to a million people working in the computer industry in California in the middle of the 1980s. The vast majority of them weren’t working amid the glamour and flash of PC companies and software makers. They weren’t making six-figure salaries, either. They were the programming army, the people who lived and breathed software languages and knew the ins and outs of every OS. They worked on mainframes, not micros. They were Californians like Trish Millines.

The basketball champ from New Jersey had gotten tired of Arizona’s heat and small-city sleepiness after two years into her job at Hughes. She rented out her house, bought a motor home, and relocated to San Francisco. Yet if the micro world was booming when she arrived in early 1982, the bigger companies that employed programmers in bulk were still locked in the Reagan recession. Once they pulled up from it, contracting work was more common than actually being hired on full-time. Without a steady paycheck to cover San Francisco’s steep cost of housing, she lived for a while out of her motor home, camping out with other high-rent refugees along Marina Green until the police swept through and shooed them out.

Employees at places like Apple might have been going on and on about all the fun they had at work, but for Millines a programming job was just a way to pay the bills. Her recreational rugby team was the thing that made the city fun. Even then, she found San Francisco to be not quite her style. One of her first jobs was teaching programming at a computer learning center—one of the many outfits that had sprung up those days to provide a few months of quickie training to would-be technologists. She got fired after only one term for being too tough a grader. “I was giving people the grade they deserved,” she chuckled, “instead of the grade they wanted.”

She eventually found a steadier programming job down in Redwood City, a little closer to the Valley action, but the transience of the Bay Area wore her out. People were hopping jobs and, as prices rose and employment slowed, they were leaving town. “I got tired of making friends all over again,” she remembered. She was learning a lot, but the Bay Area didn’t get any cheaper. By the end of 1984, she had decided to move again—this time to Seattle. Green and rainy, cheaper and friendlier, not many black folks but lots of jobs for software engineers. By January, Trish Millines was driving the 800 miles north, toward her next adventure. Silicon Valley might have contained a pot of gold for some, but the housecleaner’s kid from the Jersey Shore never found it.

Millines wasn’t the only one heading in that direction those days. A slowing economy and sky-high real estate prices were pushing people out of both Northern and Southern California, and a good number of them ended up in the Pacific Northwest.

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