I virtually fell into computing in Lusaka,Zambia, in 1967. I had moved to Zambia withmy husband, who had accepted a post therewith a consulting engineering company, andmy three small children. My bachelor’s degreewas in physics, and job opportunities were lim-ited. I tried teaching for a short while but wasthen offered a post at the University of Zambia(UnZa) as a research assistant in the PhysicsDepartment. This was soon after the universityadmitted its first students in March 1966.Zambia had only recently attained its inde-pendence, and UnZa was its first university.There were few existing Zambian graduates, andthe university was largely staffed by expatriates.

My “research” consisted mainly of orderingand setting up equipment for the new physicslaboratories. I was looking for another challengewhen a colleague, Gerda Siann, asked me if Iwould like to transfer to the new computer cen-ter and work with her as a computer program-mer. I didn’t have any idea what programmingwas, but I needed a change and so I accepted. Atthe time, the university did not own a comput-er; instead, we punched programs onto 80-col-umn Hollerith cards using a mechanicalthree-hole punch and ran them on an ICLmachine located 10 minutes away at theMinistry of Finance. When the listing came back,generally with mistakes resulting from punching(or programming or logic) errors, we would oftenpress the cardboard chips (chads) back into theholes and repunch just the bad column—repunching a whole 72 columns of code couldtake quite a while. Without significant practice, itwould probably take about two seconds topunch one character on a card.

The ICL machine used to make a sound as itwas running a program; the tighter the loop that

the code was executing, the higher the pitch ofthe note. The operators were accustomed to run-ning commercial applications, which seldomexecute a tight loop, and so would often killGerda’s matrix inversion programs, thinking theprograms were executing an endless loop.

Shortly after I started, Gerda departed for athree-month leave and UnZa’s IBM 1130arrived. Effectively my own boss, with no oneto breathe down my neck telling me I wasdoing it all wrong, and with the help of anexcellent IBM software engineer, I soon got thehang of programming it.

Student records systemThe dean of natural sciences, Alan Ward (my

former boss in the Physics Department), wasresponsible for determining student admissionsto the school. He began sending down requeststo the computer center for statistical analyses offirst-year results with correlations to high-school-leaving examination results. It occurredto me that these analyses would be much easierto produce if all the student examination gradeswere stored permanently in the computer, andso the UnZa student records system was born.The university engaged a veritable army of post-graduate students to enter all the data from theuniversity opening date in 1966 (by this time itwas being entered on IBM programmable-card-punch machines).

In time, this system (which we programmedin Fortran IV) became a comprehensive suite ofprograms for registering students on arrival;producing class lists; scheduling students intolectures, labs, and tutorials; preparing theexamination timetable; and much more. Weentered all examination grades into the com-puter, and the annual results lists were pub-

Half a Lifetime in Computing:Experiences in Zambia, Britain, andAustraliaValerie A.G. Macduff

This brief overview tells of the author’s 35 years in the computingindustry. Her career began coincidentally with a move to Zambia inthe 1960s, where she learned to program an IBM 1130. Following amove to Australia in 1989, she began her own computer consultancyto the geographical information community.

64 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE

lished from printouts that had been outputdirectly onto offset litho paper. Not long afterthe records system started, another female pro-grammer, Sue Russell, joined me in developingthe system. As the system grew, yet anotherexpatriate woman, Kaye Stanaway, wasengaged to handle data capture and validationaspects. Along with the two or three Zambiankeypunch operators, the entire staff was femalefor a while. I maintained responsibility for thedesign and most of the programming of theinternal student records, and Sue took overresponsibility for external student records.

Only when I returned to the UK in 1974 didI learn that UnZa was way ahead of many ofthe universities in the UK in the automation ofstudent records. Of course, I know now that todevelop a records system for 5,000 students ona machine with 16 Kbytes of memory and 0.5-Mbyte removable disks is impossible. Fortu-nately, no one told me that at the time.

As the mother of three children, working inZambia was made considerably easier by theavailability of affordable household staff.

Gender split in effectWhile I was still based in Zambia, I returned

to England for an extended stay in 1969.During that time, I attended several IBM pro-gramming courses. The classes were generallysplit between about two-thirds men and one-third women. Like me, most of the program-mers had fallen into the work by accidentwhen their employers had acquired a comput-er. I believe that the gender numbers reflectedthe general gender split among employees inmany organizations. There was at the time nofeeling that this was something only mencould do. Over the succeeding years, I observedthat the proportion of women attending com-puting courses dwindled as men increasinglydominated the field and, in effect, claimed thedomain as their own. (When I enrolled for amaster’s degree in computer science atLondon’s Birkbeck College in 1985, there were15 men and only 2 women in the class.)

During my time at UnZa, the universitybegan offering a numerical analysis course thatincorporated some Fortran programming. Theprogrammers in the computer center often actedas demonstrators for the practical classes. Apartfrom this, little or no formal computer trainingwas available in Zambia. Except for the com-puter manager and some card-punch operators,the center did not employ any Zambian nation-als during my time there; this probably reflect-ed the small number of Zambian graduatesavailable for employment in those early days.

Back in the UKWhen I returned to the UK in 1974, I con-

tinued working in universities for several years,mainly on student records systems. By makingseveral job moves, I achieved the position ofstudent records officer at a university nearLondon. (Promotion in British universities ismore easily achieved by moving, so I do notattribute the lack of internal promotion to a“glass ceiling.”) In essence, the position waseffectively head of administrative computing.I believe that at the time I was the only womanholding this position at any UK university.However, it proved to be a hollow triumph,because I soon came to believe that the senioradministrators were Luddites who did not real-ly want a computer system, perhaps because oftheir age and a general fear of computers thatwas prevalent at the time. My position waspowerless, and I left after a brief time to join asoftware house (Doric Computer Systems) thatprovided consulting services to industry.

Since moving to the UK, I had been a singleparent working full time. School holidays werealways a problem, but in the early years therelaxed atmosphere of a university campusmade it possible to take the children, nowmostly in their teens, to work with me. By thetime I left university work, they were oldenough to look after themselves.

Geographical Information SystemsIn 1986, Doric Computer Systems was

offered the chance to become the UK distribu-tor for the ESRI Geographical InformationSystem (GIS) package called Arc/Info. As it hap-pened, in 1969 while in England I had workedfor a few months for the ExperimentalCartography Unit in Oxford, one of the earlyGIS research sites (although we didn’t call it GISback then). On the strength of this experience,Doric selected me to be the technical expert forthe Arc/Info package, and so a whole newphase of my computing life began (at the ageof 51). At the time, the biggest interest in GISwas coming from the Highways Departmentsbecause of some recent national legislation.After researching their requirements, I soonrealized that the standard Arc/Info softwarecould not meet their needs.

GIS systems in the mid-1980s mostly mod-eled geographical features as points, lines, orpolygons. Each shape could have a set ofattached attributes, so a road, for example, mayhave its name and route number stored asattribute values. The problem with the data col-lected by highways authorities was that the datawere georeferenced by odometer reading along

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the length of the road, rather than by the geo-graphical coordinates required for GIS dataentry. Furthermore, for roads, many differentdata sets are collected: skid resistance, rough-ness, surface type, and white line markings, toname but a few. The values for each data typecan change at arbitrary intervals along the road,and it’s necessary to be able to show any or allof them by appropriate symbols on the map.Without splitting up the linear features intonumerous fragments, it was simply not possibleto achieve this with the standard model.

I had attended a course on writing exten-sions to Arc/Info, so I was able to develop someadditional commands to handle these sorts ofcomplexities. These extensions were success-fully deployed at several UK highways authori-ties. To the best of my knowledge, I was the firstperson in the world to develop a commercialsolution to this problem.1 Consequently, in1990 I was engaged by ESRI in California todesign a permanent extension to Arc/Info thatbecame known as dynamic segmentation.When employed by ESRI, I became the firstwoman to work as a lead programmer on themain development team for Arc/Info.

The GIS computing field seems to haveattracted more women than most other areas ofcomputing. At Doric we sometimes had as manywomen as men working in that area. Over theyears between 1985 and 1995, I attended manyGIS conferences and observed that the propor-tion of women working in the field varied enor-mously by country. The US was the mostadvanced, with perhaps 40 percent or more ofthe delegates being female. The UK would haveperhaps 20 percent female attendance andAustralia probably less than 10 percent.

In 1989, I emigrated from the UK to Aus-tralia. I initially worked for the ESRI head officein California over the Internet and then for ESRIAustralia in Perth. Australia was one of the earlyadopters of GIS technology, and many govern-ment departments in Perth already had aninstalled system when I arrived. In this respect,Australia appeared to be ahead of the UK butthe use of GIS was largely restricted to special-ists in a GIS department, often working ratherinefficiently in command line mode. In the UK,on the other hand, although fewer companieshad adopted GIS technology, organizationsappeared more willing to invest in applicationdevelopment to handle their site-specific needs.

A systems consultancyIn 1992, I set up my own GIS consultancy

company (GeoSys GIS Consultants), whicheventually grew to have about 10 employees.

Our contracts mainly involved the developmentof GIS data capture and viewing systems forAustralian government departments includingthe Aboriginal Affairs Department in WesternAustralia. Western Australia is fortunate in hav-ing a rich digital map base, having started on thecollection of property boundaries and associat-ed textual data in digital form in the early 1980s(ahead of much of the rest of the world). Theavailability of these data fueled a demand forend-user access, and GeoSys was instrumental indeveloping systems to fill some of this need.

The Aboriginal Affairs Department, now theDepartment of Indigenous Affairs, also neededGIS tools to manage a large database of infor-mation on Aboriginal sacred sites. The require-ments of this system were complex given thatsome key sites needed special protection toconceal their exact location. Only when a pro-posed development such as a road or pipelineis known to be at risk of affecting such a sitecan the information necessary to protect it berevealed to authorized persons. The automatedmapping systems developed by GeoSys pro-duced maps that showed only a 10-Km boxaround such sites and displayed an accuratelocation for the less important sites.

In 2000, I sold my consultancy business buthave continued working on the design anddevelopment of a desktop GIS browser calledIntraGIS. It’s in use by several hundred public ser-vants in Western Australia and has also recentlybecome available on the Internet (www.intragis.com.au). I now have grandchildren andone great-grandchild, but I still enjoy designingand building computer systems and intend tocarry on doing so for as long as possible.

Reference1. V.A.G. Macduff, “Modelling One-to-Many Rela-

tionships on Arc Data for a Highways InformationSystem,” Proc. ESRI User Conf., ESRI, 1987.

Valerie A.G. Macduff is a GISconsultant specializing in thedesign of GIS solutions for non-specialist staff. She has a BSc inphysics, and an MSc in data-base and information systems,from London University.

Readers may contact Valerie Macduff atVal.Macduff@intragis.com.au.

For further information on this or any other com-puting topic, please visit our Digital Library athttp://computer.org/publications/dlib.

66 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

Half a Lifetime in Computing