As a senior at CC, Cathy Priest ’66 knew she had a choice to make. Teaching, nursing, and marriage were the three accepted tracks for female graduates at the time. She had her math teaching credentials, but she wanted something different.
During Spring Break, Priest road-tripped out to the Bay Area for interviews with IBM and other companies. Her time at IBM didn’t start smoothly as she got in a car accident on the way, but still made the full day of interviews.
Back in Colorado, the call came: She had a job as a programmer.
When Priest began her job at IBM in 1966, she was one of four female programmers on a team of 60.
“We were not very well received by the men. The career path had been for the men to be computer operators, and, if they did well, they could be promoted to programmers. And here were four girls right off a college campus who knew nothing about programming and had taken their jobs. We had to prove ourselves.”
Priest set about to do exactly that. She began to learn programming from instruction books and classes. And, despite sexism, she thrived at IBM. Her first big job was programming for a large IBM supply distribution warehouse. “I didn’t know anything about distribution warehouses and safety stock and backorder tickets, so I learned the business and then wrote a program to support them. It was really fun,” she recalls.
At the time, IBM was reinventing computing with innovations like the disc drive and the IBM System/360, which first allowed software compatibility between machines.
“When I first started, virtually nothing was done on a disk. All of our work was done with big, big reels of tape. There were no online terminals.” Priest’s programming jobs that supported the manufacturing of disk drives ran in batches at night. If they failed, she would get a call waking her up.
With time, Priest moved up in the company and enjoyed a variety of jobs. She joined the IBM sales organization supporting, selling, and managing sales to large customers including Hewlett Packard. After 30 years, she left IBM and went to Informix Software, where she managed the customer support organization for the Americas. When IBM acquired Informix four years later, she became the Worldwide Director of Relational Database Support – a position she held until 2004.
Outside of work, Priest has led a full and active life. She enjoys philanthropy, water skiing, golf, birding, hiking, skeet shooting, duplicate bridge, and hunting. She didn’t miss a ski season for 60 years and twice competed at the World Championships in International One Design (IOD) sailboat racing. She adopted her husband’s two sons and still Zooms monthly with close friends from Ticknor Hall.
Although she never became a teacher, she credits some of her success to the confidence she gained during student teaching.
“I was fairly shy when I entered CC. Student teaching was fun and gave me the confidence to speak in front of groups. Throughout my career, I had to do a lot of that.”