The opening of “The Computer Girls,” Lois Mandel’s classic 1967 Cosmopolitan article about the promise of young women entering the field of computer programming, a promise which has only been partly fulfilled:

Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher…maybe a librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could go into the professions and compete with men…usually working harder and longer to earn less pay for the same job.

Now have come the big, dazzling computers–and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store.

And if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work–well, it just is.

‘I had this idea I’d be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all day long,’ says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. ‘I couldn’t have been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem, and then instruct the machine to do it.’

“It’s just like planning a dinner,” explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.

What she’s talking about is aptitude–the one most important quality a girl needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind.•

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Grace Hopper outwits David Letterman in 1986: