I was the first woman engineer at DEC,” recalls Barbera Stephenson. “Customers would call for an applications engineer. They’d say, ‘I want to speak with an engineer’ and I’d say, ‘I’m an engineer’ and they’d say, ‘No, I want to speak with a real engineer.’
“I developed this patter: ‘Well, tell me about the application you have in mind. We have three lines of modules ranging from five to ten megacycles and …’ The line would go dead and I’d hear, ‘Hey Joe, guess what, I’ve got a…woman…engineer on the phone!”