In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led many companies to send their employees home to work remotely instead of in-person. This shift was made possible by the Internet and video-conferencing technologies supported by cloud computing services.  

Over 50 years earlier, in 1969 to be precise, Marjorie (Marge) Hoogeboom began working remotely as a computer programmer for General Electric (GE), making her one of the first—perhaps the first—computing teleworkers in the world. Retired �鶹�� computer science professor Joel Adams interviewed Marge to document her story. 

[This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.����

JA:  Welcome, Marge, it’s great to see you again. Let’s start at the beginning: When were you born? Where did you grow up, and what was life like then? 

MH: I was born in 1943. The Pearl Harbor attack had happened in 1941, and World War II was on. The war and its aftermath affected my early life. I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attended the Christian schools here, and graduated from Grand Rapids Christian High School in 1960. 

JA: Did anything happen during your early years that especially encouraged you to pursue a career in technology? 

MH: In the 1950s, the Cold War was happening. Everyone was saying how important math and science were, and I was good at math. When I was in high school, the Reader’s Digest had an article about computers with a picture of a woman working at a computer. Hardly anyone even knew what a computer was back then. The article described what computer programming was, and how it was a great career for women, so I decided that that was what I wanted to do. 

After high school, I attended Calvin College here in Grand Rapids. Back then, Calvin didn’t have a computer science program or even any real computer programming courses, so I majored in math at Calvin for three years and then transferred to Purdue University, which had lots of programming courses. Purdue accepted all of my Calvin courses and I learned Fortran (Formula Translation) for scientific work, COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) for business, and several other programming languages. I spent three semesters there learning different aspects of computing, and graduated from Purdue in January 1965. 

During my time at Calvin, I met Tom Hoogeboom, my eventual husband. He was a chemistry major and two years older than me. We were both musicians in Calvin’s orchestra, and had lots of things in common. To make a long story short, we dated while we were at Calvin and at the end of my junior year, he graduated and headed off to grad school at Purdue—which was another factor in my transferring to Purdue. We decided to get married the summer after my junior year at Calvin, so I was married the three semesters I spent at Purdue. 

JA: When was the first time you ever used a computer, and what was using it like? 

MH: That would have been in 1963, the semester I transferred to Purdue. To write a program, you sat at a keypunch and typed the lines of your code onto Hollerith punchcards—one line of code per card—and when you were done, you took your stack of cards to the IBM preprocessor.

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The preprocessor read the program on your cards into the mainframe, which translated your program into the computer’s language, and if your program had no errors, ran it.  

If your program had errors, you got back a paper printout (often the next day) that listed your program and its errors. To fix them, you had to retype the cards containing the errors and try again by resubmitting your revised stack of cards to the preprocessor. The compilers and system software were stored on tape drives. There were no personal computers—it was completely different from programming a computer today! 

JA: What was your first job after you graduated? 

MH: After he finished grad school, Tom was hired by General Electric (GE) to work at their Corporate R&D Center in Schenectady, New York, so we moved there. GE had a project to create the operating system for a Honeywell computer, and they were having trouble finding people who could program—they were giving logic tests to all their employees, trying to find people with the aptitude. I showed up already knowing a bunch of different programming languages, including assembly language like they were using for their project. They wanted to hire me full-time, but we had our first daughter Karen and I only wanted to work part-time. They wanted me for at least 30 hours per week but I only wanted 20 hours so that I could spend more time with her. After some back-and-forth, they agreed to the half-time position, so I worked all day on Mondays and Wednesdays and half the day on Friday. 

JA: Was that working in-person? 

MH: Yes, that was in-person work. 

JA: Were there many women working there? 

MH: Just three of us were women, out of more than 700 employees. 

JA: How did you come to work remotely? 

MH: Tom’s specialty was color chemistry and in 1969, GE transferred him to their facility in Mt. Vernon Indiana, to work on the colored resins they used to make molded plastics. We had our second daughter Cheryl by then, so I figured I would just stay at home. But at my send-off party in New York, my boss said how much they were going to miss me—that I had been more productive working half-time than any of their full-time employees! By 1969, we were working at ‘terminals’—basically paper-teletypes with keyboards, connected to the mainframe computer—so I said to my boss that if he wanted me to keep working, GE could install a terminal in our house in Indiana. He said, “Would you really be open to that?” and I said, “Sure.” So after we were settled in Indiana, they installed a terminal in our house there and set up a dedicated phone line between it and GE’s mainframe in New York, over 1000 miles away.  

JA: So you were a long-distance teleworker in 1969. That was pretty much unheard of back then, wasn’t it? 

MH: Yes, it was so unusual, our local newspaper ran a story about it with a picture of me at my terminal. They had to install more than seven miles of copper cable in our county to set up my connection and they had trouble finding enough copper cable locally. 

JA: What was it like, programming remotely on a mainframe in 1969? What was your workflow? 

MH: Each Monday, I would receive a package containing a greenbar-paper listing of the program we were writing—the operating system for this Honeywell computer—and its unresolved issues. That week, I would use that listing to find the bugs in the program and use the terminal in our home to enter corrections to the code. The terminal let me edit the code one line at a time. When I was done on Friday, I would issue a special command at the terminal; after I entered that command, the office in New York would incorporate my changes, print a new listing of the program and its remaining problems, ship it to me, and start the cycle for the next week. 

JA: How long did that last, and what brought it to an end? 

MH: Writing and then maintaining an operating system was a big project and my position lasted for several years. But Honeywell was having trouble competing against IBM, so GE began planning to lay off some people. I thought that if I stepped down, that would be one less person on the project and someone else could keep their job, so I resigned. With two daughters, I worked as a full-time mom for a while. But I missed the challenges of programming, so after a couple of years, I applied to Mead-Johnson in Evansville, Indiana, who hired me as a programmer. Some of my work there involved working with the time-sharing operating system on their Indiana mainframe and networking it with the mainframe in their Arizona plant. This was the mid-70s, before the Internet existed, so we were building our own wide area network, and had to invent the networking protocols necessary to make it work. 

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JA: That’s fascinating—you were building your own corporate Internet. What happened after that? 

MH: By the late 1970s, we wanted to move closer to our families in west Michigan. GE was selling colored resins and Tom had the idea of selling the colors separately from the resins. GE wasn’t interested, so Tom decided to start a company based on that idea. We moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan to start that company near the companies who would be the customers. God really blessed that work—our company did very well—it has let us fund over 70 Calvin scholarships since then, along with other philanthropic giving.  

By that time, I had a very strong resume, so I had lots of work-opportunities. I ended up at Upjohn, which is now part of Pfizer. I worked there through the 1980s; they were kind enough to award me their William B. Upjohn Prize as an outstanding employee in 1989. 

JA: Knowing you, I’m sure you were a prized employee at Upjohn. What were some of the other highlights of your career? 

MH: I once met Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who coined the term “bug” for a computer glitch. She found a dead moth that was causing a short-circuit inside the computer at Harvard. She also led the team that developed the COBOL language, led the effort to develop technology standards, and had many other accomplishments.  

I met her at a conference; I drove her between the conference and the airport. That contact led to her coming to Calvin to give a talk in the mid-1980s. I still have one of her “nanoseconds”—a piece of wire just under a foot long (the distance an electron travels in a nanosecond)—that she used to help admirals and generals understand why satellite communication took so long compared to ground communication. 

We also had our third daughter Kathy in the 1980s. 

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JA: I know Kathy. She had amazing Linux skills; she worked on Dahl—our third Beowulf cluster here at Calvin—as its student system administrator. And I know Cheryl; she is an excellent French horn player. I don’t think I’ve met Karen. 

MH: Karen pursued health care; Cheryl went into education; Kathy was a physics major. After Calvin, she did her PhD in physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder and is now in an upper-level position at Intel Corp. She always ran circles around the rest of us when it came to technology. 

JA: Were there other formative influences that affected your career? 

MH: I am very thankful for the three years I spent at Calvin. I received excellent training in mathematics; that and Calvin’s liberal arts core curriculum were key in equipping me with critical thinking and communication skills that helped me professionally. I was very glad when Calvin started offering programming courses in the 1970s and a computer science program in 1980—I wrote a letter supporting that decision. 

JA: Are there other projects that you have especially enjoyed working on?  

MH: God has blessed our family richly. One of the ways Tom and I have tried to give back is volunteering with the Christian Reformed Church’s program, in their service. We built a database program for them. Their field workers could interview people who had been through a disaster—a hurricane, earthquake, tornado or whatever—and collect data about their situation. The field workers would then enter that data in our database, and our program would help prioritize the relief efforts, identifying the people whose needs were most urgent to get them the resources they needed. Tom and I worked on that project together. 

JA: I remember meeting Tom when you served on Calvin’s Board of Trustees; you two must have been a great team. 

MH: Yes. It has been several years since he died and I still miss him every day. 

JA: I’m sorry that he’s gone. I’m glad that you had so many good years together. 

How are you keeping busy these days?  

MH: I’m the President of CALL—Calvin’s Academy for Lifelong Learning. I’m also on the boards of several organizations. Those activities keep me pretty busy. 

I also continue to enjoy playing my oboe whenever I get the chance, including in Calvin’s community orchestra. 

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JA: Our hour is nearly up and I want to respect your time. We live in challenging times. Do you have any advice for today’s college students or young adults as they try to navigate our world? 

MH: Our society is so divided today. Instead of judging another person, try to put yourself in their situation and imagine what life is like for them. We all need to practice more empathy for one another. 

JA: Thank you for that wise advice, and for spending this time with me today, Marge. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure! 

MH: Thank you!