Career
Anita Borg got her first programming job in 1969. Although she loved math while growing up, she did not originally intend to go into computer science and taught herself to program while working at a small insurance company. She earned a doctorate in computer science from New York University in 1981. Her dissertation was on operating system synchronization efficiency.
After receiving her Ph.D., Anita Borg spent four years building a fault tolerant Unix-based operating system, first for Auragen Systems Corp. of New Jersey and then with Nixdorf Computer in Germany.
In 1986, she began working for Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Laboratory, where she spent 12 years.
While at Digital Equipment, she developed and patented a method for generating complete address traces for analyzing and designing high-speed memory systems. Her experience running the ever-expanding Systers mailing list, which she founded in 1987, led her to work in email communication. As a consultant engineer in the Network Systems Laboratory, she developed MECCA, an email and Web-based system for communicating in virtual communities.
In 1997, Anita Borg left Digital Equipment Corporation and began working as a researcher in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC. Soon after starting at Xerox, she founded the Institute for Women and Technology, having previously founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 1994.
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“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
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