Maverick Engineering Social Media

Board of Advisors Member

Linda McCalla, Ph.D. – Programming for Success

Linda McCalla has a working background that you don’t see much today; she spent almost all of her working career with one company – Texas Instruments. She started at TI while pursuing a B.S. in Mathematics (minor in Physics) at Arlington State College (now UT Arlington) and stayed with the company for the next 33 years.

During those years, she held a number of technical and management positions of increasing responsibility in design automation, calculator development, defense systems, research, software engineering and systems engineering. Dr. McCalla was director of TI’s Software Core Competency group when she took early retirement in 1998 to care for her critically ill mother.

“For many years at TI, I was the only female professional in my work group,” Dr. McCalla said. “It was my privilege to be a catalyst in the hiring of more women in these groups and see changes over the years concerning attitudes toward women in the workplace. Over 30 years ago, a friend and I started an informal ‘lunch bunch’ for TI women professionals that gradually grew over the years. Some of these women later held leadership positions in other companies, some at TI. We still meet once a month, although many of us have retired.”

Dr. McCalla continued her education while at TI, receiving her master’s degree in mathematics from North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) and a doctorate in management science, with a concentration in operations research, from UT Dallas. This helped her to prepare for her many research-related endeavors, including leading a number of “blue sky” teams tasked with developing ideas for future areas of research and development. Among the many projects she worked on or headed were the development of TI’s SofTware Engineering Process (STEP), the VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) Hardware Description Language with IBM, and the General Language for Artwork Design system, one of the first copyrighted software program systems. She also served as the TI reviewer and technical advisor for research at several external organizations, including the University of Southern California’s Center for Systems and Software Engineering.

“My experiences at TI made me a target of many head-hunters,” she said with a smile. “As a result, a number of companies offered me jobs with more pay, responsibility for more people and/or more impressive titles, but no one offered me a position that promised better or more exciting opportunities to work with brighter people or to advance the state-of-the-art and thus change the future. I believe it is very important to enjoy your work, and I really enjoyed working at TI.”

TI is known around the world, of course, as the leader in hand-held calculators, and Dr. McCalla had a hand in their development. She created and tested the software (microcode) for TI’s SR-51 scientific calculator, the SR-52 (the first programmable scientific calculator) and the dual purpose printer for the SR-51 and the SR-52. She also participated in early design for the SR-59.

“I remember a great sense of satisfaction in my job when I first held the prototype SR-51 and realized that people all over the world would be performing calculations according to my designs. Years later, I was consulting with a project at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon. The principal scientist showed me a published paper he had written about using the SR-51 to teach mathematics. Each time people told me how useful that calculator was to them, I would re-live that sense of job satisfaction.”

While at TI, Dr. McCalla authored, co-authored and presented papers at professional conferences and served on the editorial board for the journal Requirements Engineering published by Springer-Verlag. She also was the program chair or tutorial chair for several of the IEEE’s MIDCON conventions.

One project that Dr. McCalla led, however, fell completely outside of her normal area of responsibilities. She wrote, produced, directed and served as talent for several training videos in Requirements Engineering.

“I always enjoyed the creative process. Editing the films was as much fun as writing and directing. However, because the filming spanned a number of months, I learned the importance of continuity. Wearing the same clothes and the same hairstyle for the duration became tiresome. Keeping my suit clean and my hair always the same length was a pain. I remember celebrating the end of filming by enjoying a chocolate ice cream cone and being very glad it didn't matter if the drips stained my ‘costume.’”

Her interests outside of the engineering world include serving as president of the Texas Astronomical Society of Dallas for two terms (2001-2003) and chairing ALCON/EXPO 2006, the annual convention and vendor exposition for the Astronomical League. She was president of Altrusa International of Dallas during 1994-1995 and is a member of Tau Beta Pi. Dr. McCalla has been a member of the College of Engineering’s Board of Advisors and the advisory council for UT Arlington’s Fort Worth Center since their inception.

“People continue to tell us we will need more engineers and scientists in the future,” she said. “To achieve that, I believe we need to ‘prime the pump’ by showing young people how fun and interesting engineering, science and mathematics can be. In grade school, I loved looking at the night sky and learning more about the stars and planets. I became interested in science and math because my teachers told me I had to learn more in both fields if I wanted to become an astronomer. Those studies made me more interested in jobs applying science and math to real-world problems. I never lost a passion for astronomy, but now it’s a hobby. My husband (Howard, who I met in my first class at Arlington State) and I enjoy participating in star parties where we can share our hobby with young people. It is very rewarding to watch a young girl or boy look through a telescope and really see Saturn for the first time. That ‘WOW’ moment can open the door to talking about the movements of planets and their satellites, optics, different types of telescopes, etc. Who knows, this experience could become the beginning of a great career in engineering or science.”