So today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday.  She was born during the Great Depression to a German-immigrant family in Eastern Pennsylvania, very close to the great battlefield of Gettysburg.  She used to tell me that she didn’t know they were poor… her Grandfather was a butcher so they always had food, she had 8 aunts & uncles who spoiled her, and her clothes were always store-bought.  She was a very pretty, shy child that excelled in school and was even a lifeguard and diving champ, but never the Prom Queen.

What does this have to do with computers, you may ask?  Well, we lost Elizabeth Ann Sulanke D’Eustachio in 1983 to cancer, and not a day goes by that I do not miss her, or turn to ask her something.  After graduating with a BA in Biology, she was snapped up by Smith/Kline for their new sunscreen division in 1963 (which is another blog for another day!), and after we moved to sunny So Cal in the late 60s, she decided to take night classes at the newly opened UC Irvine, where she learned computer programming.

She quickly became a master at Fortran and the other languages, and was quick to take her new skills to the market place.  She landed a newly created job in 1972 with the City of Newport Beach, creating a computer program for tracking speeding tickets.  Mere child’s play now, but let’s remember that this was BEFORE desktop computers, before Apple and before PCs.  Interestingly, when my Dad was getting his PhD at Penn State (in microbiology) in the mid 50s, he worked on the Univac Computer Project, where they say the lights of Philadelphia dimmed when they turned on the computer, which was larger than a city-block.

Mom, me and my sister… Christmas 1976. Still no desk top computers at this time. Stay tuned.

But back to my Mom… after the City job, she went on to a small accounting firm who was getting into computer payroll programs, and she actually wrote the first ever program to track and report on payroll.  The firm’s clients included Disney, Allergan and other large corporations.  She was a hero and lauded for her pioneering work on programs that were applicable to business, and that worked!  I remember summers spent entering info on punch cards, which you then inserted, IN ORDER, into the computer to be read, and then getting the multi-page report with the data.  At that time, computers were not used for word processing, design or anything other than these types of programs.

Unfortunately, Mom passed away just before desktop computers were introduced to the business world.  I often wonder where and how far she would have gone in this new tech world with her innate knowledge and gift for talking to machines.  She loved her programming, and the data loved her.  Never a mistake, line after line after line.

I remember she was one of the first people to use and like the ATM at UCBank… very few bank patrons used it but she LOVED the concept of a computer accessing her account and spitting out cash!  I’ll bet she would have had the first PDA, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.  I think she might have been a PC girl more than a Mac, because initially PCs were better at business.  But maybe not.  She was very creative and crafty, teaching my sister and I to cook, sew, knit, embroider, bake and all that cool stuff that girls used to know.

We grew up reading SciFi, and always marveled at things like phones that could be used while traveling (Robert Heinlein’s “Space Cadet,” circa 1938), the thought of private space craft, colonizing other planets and casual space travel.  We sat together in awe and watched as Neil and Buzz landed on the moon… we dreamed of landing on other moons and planets.  We never worried about aliens, if they existed then GREAT!  We loved Star Trek and almost anything SciFi where the future was shiny and bright,and machines helped us in everything we did.

And now here we are… desk top computers and smart phones that have more capability than the entire NASA computer that landed a man on the moon… notepads that put the world of books, reading and video at our fingertips… and the ability to do business anywhere and anytime, just ask my clients and staff here at FG Creative, who get emails and texts at all hours!

Not that I’m sure that is a good thing, still pondering that.

So here’s to my Mom, happy birthday to you, who I believe could have taught Steve Jobs and Bill Gates a thing or two.   Gone too soon, but always remembered and loved.  And here’s to my Mac laptop, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV and, and, and… I’m glad, mostly, that you’re all a part of my life.  My Mom would be proud.