Nomi
Trapnell

BIO:

Nomi Trapnell was a female pioneer in the field of technology primarily in software engineering and management since the 1960s. She worked in software product development for Silicon Valley companies such as Hewlett-Packard, ROLM, IBM, Tandem before retiring in 2007.

The following bio was provided by Nomi Trapnell.

“My name is Nomi Trapnell and I was born in El Salvador in Central America; my family came to the USA when I was 10 years old. I’m 80 years old now and I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1962. Initially I lived in Los Altos Hills and then moved to Los Altos. I’m an old time Los Altos resident, since the train was still going up and down on Foothill Expressway.  

I got my degree in math. By luck I applied for a job at Lockheed. They gave me a test and I was hired. It was in the early 1960’s before computers were something everybody knew about. They offered to teach me programming and I picked it up quickly; if you have a logical mind, you can be good at programming. I was working on scientific orbit simulation applications. After that I decided it would be better to go to work for a computer company because I liked computers so much. In those days, there were so few women in tech, that there was no real discrimination. If you could do the job, you got promoted. 

I went to Control Data, one of the most important computer companies in those days; they made very large mainframe computers for scientific applications. I worked on system software products and was promoted to computing management and was eventually in charge of software system design for the largest computer line.

But I always wanted to work for a company that had its headquarters here in the Bay Area so I went to work for ROLM. They had things that we now take for granted in Silicon Valley: indoor and outdoor swimming pools, gyms, and other sport facilities. You could use the recreation center any time of the day, even during the workday, nobody cared as long as the work got done. We also had beer busts on Fridays. Then we were sold to IBM, they didn’t allow any of this. People had to be very professional. After 5 years, IBM sold us to Siemens which had its headquarters in Germany, a company that had very few women in management. At the time I was in charge of one [of the] product lines. When I met my new manager, he asked, ‘How come you have this job? you’re a woman, you’re married, you have children.’ I said to him ‘I have a secret weapon: my mother lives with me.’ He thought that was OK and that I could continue on the job. I stayed and got promoted to VP. Then I moved to another Bay Area headquartered company, Tandem. Then Compact bought Tandem, and finally, HP bought us, and I eventually retired from HP. 

HP was a great company, one of the early companies of Silicon Valley. This area was dubbed Silicon Valley after the silicon in integrated circuit chips made here by companies like Fairchild, Intel, National Semiconductor, etc. A lot of changes were first made in hardware but later the software user interfaces also improved. That’s why today we have user friendly interfaces: “what you see is what you get,” windows, point & click. None of this existed initially. Xerox PARC was the first to create such user-friendly interfaces. Apple saw the software at a demo and introduced them into products like the Macintosh. Now we have microprocessors that are billions of times faster than what we had when I started. This has made it possible to have something like an iPhone in our pocket.

I love the history of this area. I was president of the Los Altos History Museum and I’m now a docent at the Computer History Museum and a commissioner on the Los Altos Historical Commission.

Why did Silicon Valley happen here? There were a lot of reasons: Stanford and other universities, the government also played a role by funding research. There were visionary people and companies, like HP, IBM, and they created an atmosphere where many contributed in the early days. The venture capitalists played a big role, investing money, taking the risk and starting companies. California is the place where people went to start a new life. We got the “cream of the crop.” They came to school here and then stayed. 

Los Altos is a great little town with a quiet village atmosphere; young families love Los Altos, it has great schools, it’s very walkable, the downtown is unique, and the climate is ideal. I feel fortunate to live here.”

Womanhood is a public art and digital media project that promotes the historical contributions of women to Santa Clara County. https://womanhoodproject.org/

Womanhood is supported by the County of Santa Clara Office of Women’s Policy.