Creator: Helen Spence

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Description:

Helen Spence came to MSU as a student in 1936 and worked as a lab assistant in the physics department. After she graduated in early 1939, she taught math, physics and chemistry in a public school in Portland, Michigan.

In 1942 she married Bob Spence and they moved out East where her husband taught radar to Army and Navy personnel while she worked in the theoretical division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Lab on state-of-the-art computers (Monroes and Marchants – mainly electrically-powered calculating machines that carried 10 digits and could add, subtract, multiply and divide but not figure square roots).

Spence and her husband came to MSU in 1947 where he taught in the Physics Department and she was an instructor in the Computer Science Department, teaching Assembly languages. She helped program the first major computer on campus and eventually taught FORTRAN in the 1960s. Mrs. Spence retired in 1987. She passed away September 27, 2014.

Topics/People Covered in the Interview include: Walter Adams; Assembly languages; Albert Einstein; Eric Goodman; Lewis Greenberg; campus in 1947; computer program; female faculty/students; student housing; women students; Women's Building; MIT Radiation Lab; computers; Computer Science Department; FORTRAN; effect of the Great Depression; MIT Radiation Lab; Lawrence Von Tersch

Date: June 1, 2005

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections, Office of the Provost

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections