Title
Merry-Shapiro, Diana oral history
Catalog Number
102792732
Type
Moving image
Description
Diana Merry-Shapiro was born Diana Mayhew in 1939, in Des Moines, Iowa, to a Lutheran family. After graduating from Valparaiso University with a major in Theater and minors in Philosohpy and Theology, Mayhew worked as a journalist for the Washington Post, studied law at Valparaiso, and worked in a public relations firm in New York before marrying Don Merry, and moving to southern California for her husband’s job at defense contractor TRW. When her husband decided to get a law degree at Santa Clara University, Diana Merry needed to find a job to support them, and learned IBM assembly language programming and plug-board patching at a computer school. After receiving offers of secretarial work at both Data General and Xerox PARC, she chose PARC to be close to the exciting work being done there. After originally being secretary to the heads of the General Science and Optical Sciences Laboratories, she was able to shift to being the secretary of Jerry Elkind, head of the Computer Science Laboratory, where she would run into Alan Kay, head of the Learning Research Group (LRG) in the Systems Science Laboratory. She was able to convince Kay to teach her LISP and subsequently hire her as a programmer into the LRG, initially doing work on the Research Character Generator on a Data General Nova, a precursor to bitmap work that would be translated to the Alto, before formally working on Smalltalk, focusing mostly on text-related aspects of the GUI and low-level Nova machine code routines supporting it: the first text editor, the original machine code for BitBLT, machine code for animation, implementing overlapping windows, improving Larry Tesler’s class browser, writing a character scanner, contributing to the paragraph editor, writing a font editor, and collaborating with Bob Flegal on a bitmap paint program, and with Ted Kaehler on the OOZE virtual memory system. Merry’s last project in Smalltalk was a galley editor, what today would be called a page layout application.
Alan Kay’s departure from PARC left Merry without a key supporter, and she left Xerox just before the Smalltalk group was spun out as ParcPlace. In 1986 she met her partner and now spouse, Carol Shapiro. Merry-Shapiro continued to do Smalltalk contracting jobs with companies such as Apple and American Airlines, before moving to New York in 1991 after being recruited by Derek Penn at J.P. Morgan to help create Kapital, a Smalltalk-based stock trading system. Kapital became an extremely profitable technology for J.P. Morgan. After leaving J.P. Morgan in 2001, Merry-Shapiro continued to work as a Smalltalk contractor, including for a New Jersey insurance firm called Chubb, retiring in 2014.
Date
2022-08-09
Participants
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Adkinson, Justin, Camera person
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Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer
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Merry-Shapiro, Diana, Interviewee
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Publisher
Computer History Museum
Place of Publication
Union City, NJ
Duration
02:58:08
Format
MOV
Category
Oral history
Collection Title
CHM Oral History
