Katherine A. Hitchcock

In 1966, fresh out of the University of Washington, armed with a degree in mathematics and her vision of how to put information at our fingertips, Katherine Hitchcock arrived in Santa Clara County (soon to be renamed Silicon Valley) to work at the heart of an innovative IBM laboratory. Challenged to envision how computers could be used in the future, she and her team imagined and built the first online access to the library card catalog. During her remarkable thirty-five year career, from the time when computers were isolated in air-conditioned rooms to when personal computers occupied every office, she worked alongside talented IBM engineers and programmers who developed the disk drive, ATMs, barcodes, high-speed laser printers, experimental and desktop printers. Atypical Girl Geek is a lively account, from a woman’s point of view, of this dynamic industry. By sharing her personal growth, turning points, technical projects and her environmental contributions, Katherine reveals her unique journey during a time when computers completely reshaped the landscape of our society.