Lorinda Cherry received her Master’s in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969, at a time when the computer science program was more of a specialized math degree, with some programming courses but little theory. She worked for a few years as a Fortran programmer, but found it “very boring” to constantly write programs based on someone else’s ideas. She yearned to work on systems, but there were few entry points for such jobs: individual labs tended to recruit new graduates and train them in their in-house programming language, and Cherry was already overqualified. She eventually found a home at Bell Labs, where sh