So today I was digging around some old tech stories for my new job hunt, right? Stumbled on this Cath O’Donnell lady while looking up stuff about early computers. Kinda blew my mind how much she matters now when nobody really talks about her.
Getting Curious and Starting to Dig
First thing I did was just type her name into the search bar. Messed up some spellings at first – kept typing “Catherine” or “ODonell” without the apostrophe. Felt pretty dumb when nothing came up right away. Finally got the spelling straight and bam, hit a goldmine of old newspaper scans and tech museum archives.
Started clicking through everything I could find:
- Read scanned notes from some ENIAC engineers talking about her fixing wiring nightmares.
- Found a PDF of this super dry Navy report praising her team’s work saving months of manual calculation.
- Saw pictures of her pointing at these massive wall-sized machines looking dead serious.
Putting the Puzzle Together
What hit me was how she basically did modern IT project management before it even had a name. Her team was wrestling with these monster machines that filled whole rooms. She handled:
- Untangling crazy wiring errors that locked up projects for weeks
- Training physicists who didn’t know a resistor from a sandwich
- Making sense of vague military orders like “just make it faster”
It’s literally the same stuff my last boss struggled with trying to make cloud servers talk to each other last year! Except her machine weighed 30 tons and crashed every 15 minutes.
Why This Hit Home Today
I was halfway through reading about her debugging battles when my phone buzzed. Just got another job rejection email – third one this week. Sat there staring at Cath’s blurry 1945 photo while feeling sorry for myself. Her machines broke down constantly, her colleagues didn’t listen to her, and she probably got paid peanuts while solving impossible problems.
Then I realized: I’m complaining about writing cover letters while she’s literally inventing how humans communicate with machines! She didn’t have tutorials or online courses – just broken hardware and pressure. Makes my Python errors seem kinda cute now.
What I’m Taking From This
Mainly two things got drilled into my head today:
- Real problem solving doesn’t need perfect tools, just stubbornness (Cath proved that daily)
- Half the tech “wars” we fight now – like arguing over coding languages – she already fought with vacuum tubes
Seriously went from crying over my CV to laughing at how little has changed. We still got managers demanding magic fixes. Still got systems crashing at the worst moments. Still got people arguing over the “right” way to code. Cath dealt with all this using patch cables and sheer nerve while wearing skirts and heels. Puts my PHP frustrations in perspective.
Anyway, going to rewrite my resume tomorrow thinking “What Would Cath Debug?” Probably skip the heels though.