Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Math Programming Science

Rediscovering WWII's Top-Secret Computing 'Rosies' 113

An anonymous reader writes "Women were recruited to do ballistics calculations and program computers during WWII. Half a century later, their work is only beginning to get recognition." Some of that recognition is in the form of a documentary film released in 2010 titled Top Secret Rosies.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Rediscovering WWII's Top-Secret Computing 'Rosies'

Comments Filter:
  • Common practice (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @02:17AM (#35147810)

    Of course people had to these calculations back then; calculating machines that could do it were yet to be developed. The people hired to do it were almost invariably women. _When Computers Were Human_ (http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691133824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297235612&sr=8-1) is a good book on the subject, although it doesn't limit itself to WWII.

    • Of course people had to these calculations back then; calculating machines that could do it were yet to be developed.

      Mentats?

    • by Joren ( 312641 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:54AM (#35148218) Homepage
      Randomly saw this article from 2009 a few minutes before seeing this Slashdot story. Seems she had quite the career:

      "Gloria Gordon Bolotsky [washingtonpost.com] was a gifted mathematician who, after working for the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, moved to the University of Pennsylvania for a position at its engineering school. She was chosen for a secret project that would use her skills and moved with the group in 1947 to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland."
    • Re:Common practice (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @05:08AM (#35148482) Homepage Journal

      Even when the first computer became available (Colossus) it was mostly operated by women. This is quite a well documented fact and indeed the role of women in WW2 in general is seen as a major advancement for them. There were female code breakers at Bletchley Park and their role has been the subject of more than one documentary.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by oldhack ( 1037484 )
        I was told by an old-timer that many early programmers were females writing COBOL code. Not sure of its veracity, although COBOL's verbosity suggests it's plausible.
      • Even when the first computer became available (Colossus) it was mostly operated by women.

        Its been decades since I read a book on it, but I recall something about Bletchley hiring a special type of woman. Besides the obvious technical skills they also selected women with an immediate family members in front line combat units. With a son/father/husband/brother in harms way the military expected women to take security very seriously.

    • Oh - really. The people hired to do the calcs were almost invariably women. So - how do you explain all the naval gunnery? No women aboard ships back then. And, believe me, many of those gun plot and gunnery crews were dead on target, all the time. Never missed. Many engagements were decided by who saw whom first, because there was no opportunity for a second salvo. You will also note that few Army and Air Force gunners can hit naval targets. There are to many variables, for which they are unprepare
      • Umm, you know that there were very few (less than 10?) ship to ship battles in WWII right? And even fewer had battleships exchanging gunfire. Oh don't forget radar helped quite a bit with targeting. The women did trajectory tables, something that applies on land or sea. For a given angle and velocity a parabolic arc will be described given all variables are the same (a rocking ship just makes it a little tougher).
        • Umm, you know that there were very few (less than 10?) ship to ship battles in WWII right? And even fewer had battleships exchanging gunfire.

          Naval gunnery occurred far more often than you suggest, its not specific to battleships. Cruisers and destroyers engaged in many "gun fights". Perhaps one of the more famous areas for such combat was around Guadalcanal.
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Bottom_Sound [wikipedia.org]

          • My point though is how many of those were one ship firing directly on another? Planes did most of the ship sinking. I brought up battleships because many think they slugged it out often, when the opposite is true.....but what a sight to see!
            • The naval gunfire I'm referring to was ship to ship, not shore bombardment. I believe many of the ships sunk around Guadalcanal were sunk due to ship to ship gunfire. I agree that aircraft did most of the sinking in the pacific war in general, and that submarines probably came in second, but the campaign around Guadalcanal were a special case where lots of ship to ship gunfire occurred. The US Navy withdrew the carriers from the immediate vicinity of Guadalcanal to protect them. The US ships that remained t
      • Re:Common practice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @11:13AM (#35151136)

        So - how do you explain all the naval gunnery?

        They weren't on the ships. The gunners on the ships, who were indeed men, in the days before you had artillery computers (machines) had charts and tables to look up the answers in. Books of them. Who calculated those charts and tables? Women in offices hired for the task. This was the standard procedure for solving numerical problems in the days before calculating machines (slide rules were only good for about three significant digits--fine for an estimate, but no good for work that required more accuracy. Also, pre-computed references were better for involved calculations for specialized purposes (like artillery ranging)). My dad got his degree in mechanical engineering back in the '50s; I still have his slide rule--and his book of mathematical tables.

      • Oh - really. The people hired to do the calcs were almost invariably women. So - how do you explain all the naval gunnery? No women aboard ships back then.

        The sailors did not do calculations by hand. They had mechanical calculating devices that calculated a targeting solution. The sailors set relative bearing, distance, speed, etc of targets and the machines did the calculations. If sailors were doing hand calculations, there were expected to fight even if the fancy calculating machine was inoperable, they were using shortcuts such as data tables. They were not doing the full calculations from the most primitive inputs. These data tables were what the women o

      • And, believe me, many of those gun plot and gunnery crews were dead on target, all the time. Never missed.

        No, I don't believe you. (But then I've studied Big Gun fire control.) There's considerable slop in the system, and that's why they had methods of correcting their fire, like ladder fire. That's why, as late as the redeployment of the Iowa's in the 1980's they were doing things like adding radars (to track the speed of a fired shell and feed that back as a correction) and experimenting with laser ran

        • Nice to see someone that knows what the hell they are talking about.

          As for the "first to sight" rule which was being addressed, that really stems from entry of aircraft carriers. Meaning, the first to be sighted was frequently the first to be sunk. I never heard of it being applied outside of that context.

          Time in flight for an artillery shell ranges widely. I've heard numbers ranging from 10 - 60 seconds with something like 30 seconds on average. Any object in the air that long is subject to wind and likely

          • As for the "first to sight" rule which was being addressed, that really stems from entry of aircraft carriers. Meaning, the first to be sighted was frequently the first to be sunk. I never heard of it being applied outside of that context.

            I've heard a variant ("first to be heard") applied to ASW, but yeah - never to battlewagons.

            If you ever get to study USN gunnery manuals of the period, you'll be amazed at how deeply they thought about the problems. (I saw same of the same issues in the SLBM relat

    • In the late 60's a Fortune 500 corporation, that ran a chain of over 3,000 retail stores, needed to calculate annually the bonuses to be paid to the store managers.

      To do the calculations they used a room-full of Comptometers [wikipedia.org] operated by dozens of women.

      The process took as long as a week to complete.
  • by nzap ( 1985014 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @02:23AM (#35147830)
    From TFA: >>"I said 'What are you talking about?' " Erickson recalled. "I'm an amateur women's historian, but I'd never heard about this"

    I'm shocked and amazed, if even an amateur historian hasn't heard about this, it must be an amazing discovery

    • by cptdondo ( 59460 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @08:20AM (#35149316) Journal

      You're going for funny, but the women were mostly treated like crap by the military brass once the war ended. Look up the history of the female test pilots and trainers. They were typically given the worst jobs, many died on the job, and at the end of the war they got a pink slip and no recognition or benefits. The men OTOH were given parades, VA benefits, pensions, you name it.

      It's a pretty shitty part of US history and I'm glad that someone is finally recognizing the role of women in early technology.

      • Well, no, he's stating the truth - the role of these women has been known among real historians for years. Erickson is an idiot for making the assumption that since she had never heard of it, nobody else had either.

        Your statements about their treatment post war, while factually correct, are irrelevant to that.

      • And men were conscripted into the war as soldiers just because they were men. Your assessment is one sided.

    • I second your comment, and then some.

      I was absolutely gagging, reading TFA, when every third line was some heavy handed implication that this was a big secret, actively covered up by the military for half a centure...

      I don't consider myself an amateur historian, let alone that specializes in women's lib, yet I've heard about women running advanced control systems, and yes, even the ones computing ballistics tables, and cracking crypto. I guess a couple hours of History Channel a day is enough to make amate

  • by Anonymous Coward

    These are not the calculations or research work that you are trying to make it seem. This is not the work that was done by Researcher likes Feynman and others, the "calculations" they did were simple assembly line work level. Literally, they sat around a table in long rows one would add a number pass the calculation to the next, then the next would multiply... They deserve no mention, unless you will start mentioning all the farmers and shoe makers as well, which provided the food and shoes for the soldiers

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Well, the farmers and shoemakers who "provided the food and shoes for the soldiers" do deserve a mention. Indeed, the women who laboured on the farms of Britain during the War (the so-called "land girls") get mentioned all the time. So why not the female computers? Their "assembly line work" helped the Allies beat the Axis forces as did that of the land girls.

    • No in fact (Score:5, Informative)

      by ObsessiveMathsFreak ( 773371 ) <obsessivemathsfreak.eircom@net> on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @09:49AM (#35150168) Homepage Journal

      This is not the work that was done by Researcher likes Feynman and others, the "calculations" they did were simple assembly line work level.

      As a matter of fact, this is exactly what Richard Feynman worked on during his time in Los Alamos during the development of the atomic bomb.

      Feynman was in charge of a team of human computers, calculating expect bomb yields from theoretical equations or the like. They were using simple mechanical calculators to aid the process, but were otherwise simply "assembly line workers" as you put it. However, it turned out that simply regarding them in that way was not the best way to go about things. Feynman though they should be told what they were working on....


      Then they came to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines-punching holes, numbers that they didn't understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we're doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: "We're fighting a war! We see what it is!" They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.

      Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn't need supervising in the night; they didn't need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.

      So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.

      My guess is that a study of the history of human computers is likely to shed light on where many of our more esoteric computational algorithms originated from. There's probably an unwritten history of mathematical discovery that took place in these basements and number assembly lines.

      • by t3j4n4 ( 1351129 )
        Actually the history is written -- if you get an old Dover edition of Abramowitz and Stegun or older, you'll notice that the bylines on each chapter where the properties of various special functions are developed on the basis of asymptotic analysis, and they are almost all the names of the women who did this work. Disturbingly, the NIST's latest revision of A&S has redacted these womens' names. As an aside, when I was working on some of the earliest versions of Maple and visiting the guys up in Waterl
    • by t3j4n4 ( 1351129 )
      You're showing your ignorance here. A quick reading of Abramowitz and Stegun (that's *IRENE* Stegun) would enlighten you that, because the calculations were carried out by hand, a large number of algebraic approximations to special functions using asymptotic analysis for various parameter ranges were actually developed by the women doing the work. You'll notice their names in the bylines of each chapter. The use of special functions and asymptotic analysis of course goes beyond just optimizing hand cal
  • by Anonymous Coward

    First much to thank their effort.
    We also need to remember that of the effort in the British Commonwealth and especially those in the United Kingdom who worked from the beginning starting a little after 1939 to the end.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:12AM (#35148062)

    I went to high school in the late 1970's, just when the electronic calculator was becoming commercially viable. The head of our high school math department was a woman who also taught the linear algebra class. At that point she was in her 50s, and she liked to tell students her story of being a "calculator" during WW II, when she was fresh out of college. That's back when "arrays" were actual arrays of desks, one "calculator" in each performing one calculation on paper, passing the result to other calculator desks near her, getting results from others, then continuing the calculation with the newly received numbers for the next iteration.

    To this day when I'm programming a parallel physical model, I think of her saying "I was a calculator" and smiling at our bewildered faces. I'm glad to hear she's being remembered this way.

     

    • Well, it's certainly an interesting story, and hard work does deserve respect. On the other hand, I'm not sure why TFA seems to think special recognition was somehow needed for this particular group. Plenty of people worked hard during war time - be it in factories, in agriculture or in desk jobs. You can be far removed from any physical danger and still make a significant contribution to the war effort, that's understood.

      However recognition is usually given to those who directly put their lives and limbs

      • However recognition is usually given to those who directly put their lives and limbs on the line. Which seems quite reasonable, really.

        You also have to remember the rate at which men were dying in battle. Just fucking staggering. :(

      • Umm. We might be able to retain more lives and limbs if we celebrate brains as a way of winning wars.

        • Umm. We might be able to retain more lives and limbs if we celebrate brains as a way of winning wars.

          Why? Brains have given us ever more devastating weapons that require fewer people and effort to operate? Gatling/machine guns, poison gas, etc were all thought up by "brains" to reduce the casualties. Things didn't quite work out as expected. Atomic weapons are sort of the exception, so far.

          • Atomic weapons are sort of the exception, so far.

            In some ways you could think of them as that. In others that would be a wildly, some would say M.A.D.ly inaccurate statement.

    • Thank you for that very interesting anecdote. Please repeat it each time someone argues in favor of software patents.

      Pick any purely software patent, get a gang of patent lawyers to translate it to some human-comprehensible language (such as C, ADA, etc.), then have someone "skilled in the art" of programming run a program representative of the patent's claims, except run it using a group of high school math teachers with pencils and paper instead of using a "digital computer".

      If it involves a GUI, just ask

  • Very Cool. Seems incomprehensible that women would still receive decades of discrimination in the workplace after such feats; if the military trusted their intellect for such delicate matters, why couldn't everyone else? On a lighter note, what has been the replacement for our wartime programming? Martians?
    • Very Cool. Seems incomprehensible that women would still receive decades of discrimination in the workplace after such feats; if the military trusted their intellect for such delicate matters, why couldn't everyone else?

      It was not necessarily a matter of trust. Keep in mind that the great depression and massive unemployment did not really end until the ramp up of military spending for WW2. One of the great fears of the time was that when the war ended the US might return to economic depression and high unemployment. They wanted the returning veterans to have more job opportunities so wartime workers were let go, and it was not just the women. Many men who had not served in uniform were considered less desirable.

      Some con

  • Yes well..... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Its an education thing - nowadays subjects like History and Geography are not seen as "relevant" to a school curriculum and "reading about" at University level isn't such a high priority, when all that is required to graduate is to regurgitate lecture notes and anyway reading gets in the way of drinking, etc, so its not surprising that Erickson had "never heard about this".

    And "womens history" is a rather narrow field, it ignores half of humanity at a stroke (apart from casting them as abusers, rapists and

    • And "womens history" is a rather narrow field, it ignores half of humanity at a stroke (apart from casting them as abusers, rapists and general ogres) so the level of ignorance is not surprising.

      Interesting, even though is a narrow field, they still didn't know about this.

      By the way, I agree with the rest of your points.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by OutOfMyTree ( 810249 )

      Yes, you are quite right. Singling out only the men (and often only the white men) does us all a great disservice.

      • Yes, you are quite right. Singling out only the men (and often only the white men) does us all a great disservice.

        Yes, it does. But wouldn't the proper response be to ensure a history lesson is inclusive of the society, rather than further divide the topic? Otherwise it implies that History is "mens history" and shall remain that way.

        Personally, I find that many of the people in such fields are at least a generation behind. Was there a need in the 1960s to explicitly break with convention to look at underre

    • Well, absent your rant, I was going to say pretty much the same thing - the work of these 'computers' in WWII is pretty well known among historians.

      Erickson's mistake (and an all too common one, even here on Slashdot) was to believe that since she had never heard of it then nobody else had either.

  • by tonique ( 1176513 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:33AM (#35148154)

    That wasn't the first time women were employed doing calculations. A better known groups is known as "Harvard Computers", where astronomist Edward Pickering hired women to process data. One reason is said to be that women could be paid less than men.

    Two well-known women from that group were Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

    Wikipedia has a short article about them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers [wikipedia.org]

  • by tibit ( 1762298 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @04:14AM (#35148284)

    When Feynman was setting up discretized integrations [google.com] using IBM machines for the Manhattan project, he made a human calculator model for what the IBM kit would do. The girls calculated as fast as the IBM punched-card based system of tabulators, collators, multipliers, adders, etc. In his words:

    The only difference was that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.

    Never mind that he loved being around girls ;)

    • by t3j4n4 ( 1351129 )
      "Never mind that he loved being around girls ;)" Yah. While he followed Hans Bethe to Cornell and taught there for awhile, he was not offered tenure and in fact let go. The story is that he'd had an affair with a senior faculty member's wife.
      • by tibit ( 1762298 )

        I'd think that the senior faculty member could be potentially to blame for that? If my wife cheated on me, I'd first have a hard look in the mirror. Humility and all that.

  • The "real" feminists (Score:4, Interesting)

    by acidradio ( 659704 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @04:34AM (#35148380)

    I think there were a lot of women who worked hard for the war effort who didn't get and who often didn't seek recognition for what they were doing. They were just doing their part to help win the war. My granny worked for the MI6 in London during WW2 as a code cipherer. She worked 18 hr days with a rest day inbetween. None of the men in her job category did such a thing. I think she determined that this made her highly productive and her superiors went for it. She participated in some really amazing stuff and didn't talk about it until the later years of her life.

    Nowadays you have a generation of women who call themselves feminists... but are they really? They may be women who work but do they work hard in order to really advance the cause or do they do it so they can have recognition? A degree in Women's Studies doesn't make the world a better place. So many supposed feminists point to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a good role model. Hillary though stood by while her husband cheated on her then wrote a book about it. Would a real feminist do something like that?

    • Hillary though stood by while her husband cheated on her then wrote a book about it. Would a real feminist do something like that?

      Politicians are not, by and large, real anything. If you believe that Hilary was ever real, it ended after the failure of the health care package she championed. It tanked, and they never let her talk again until after she took a big wad of big pharma money.

    • Have you asked the women around you if they consider themselves feminists? You seem to be counting only a few media figures and not the many women who realise that their wish for more real equality of opportunity makes them feminists.

  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @04:36AM (#35148392)

    My mother and father were teenagers in Canada during the war. My father grew up on a farm and ranch. Before the war they always could find "hired hands" during periods where there was a lot to do. After the war started, all able bodied men were off fighting the war, and there were no "hired hands" to be found. My mother was a "city girl," But every day, after school, a bunch of school kids were trucked out to farms to help with the field work. She said that the absence of men opened up a lot of opportunities for women to enter into jobs, that used to be a "men only" club. So this story doesn't surprise me. However, when the war ended, and the men returned, the women were kicked out. Though, my mom was happy that she didn't have to work in the fields anymore.

    • by Runaway1956 ( 1322357 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @05:34AM (#35148562) Homepage Journal
      Now, now - you can't have it both ways. Was your mom "kicked out", or did she willingly head back to the safety and the comfort of the city? My mama was probably - ohhh - I'll guess 5 to 8 years older than your mama. My mama told us very clearly that she was HAPPY when she didn't have to play "Rosie the Riveter" anymore. She WANTED to go home, play house, care for her war hero, raise kids, and all that other feminine stuff. I think that most all of us, male and female, tend to see things from our own perspectives, here, today. We just forget, or gloss over, what real life was like back then.
      • or did she willingly head back to the safety and the comfort of the city?

        Read the last sentence of my post :-) My father could do a shrill whistle with just his tongue. I need to use two fingers in my mouth. When I asked him about it he answered, "If you spend your whole day shoveling shit, you don't want to put your fingers in your mouth." Neither my father nor my mother enjoyed shoveling shit.

        She WANTED to go home, play house, care for her war hero, raise kids, and all that other feminine stuff.

        Same with my mom. She worked as a secretary until she got married and pregnant, quit her job, and lived happily thereafter. Now my with my sister, a chemical engineer, it was a whol

      • And we gloss over the reality of the lives of the less fortunate today.

      • Oh, I have no doubt that your mother was glad to go back to being domestic - many women today are perfectly happy being domestic. But it's a grave error to believe that was or is a universal characteristic.

        I've known several women over the years that were extremely bitter than when the war ended they lost their 'good' jobs and were forced to go back to being shop girls, or receptionists, or housewives, or farm wives.

  • Not trying to sound like a tree-hugging hippie, but did it occur to anyone that despite the fanciness of being involved in the first computing platforms, the Rosies (and all colleagues thereof, regardless of gender) were essentially in the people-killing business?

    Granted, the conditions demanded it, but I can't help but find the science of increasing the probability of killing a fellow human with bullets and/or high explosives very disturbing...

    • Kill them before they kill us.
    • Compare 1930 and 1950. I bet the "future" came about 20 years early thanks to the war.
      • I used to think the same, i.e. that war pushes technology way more than peace can, but I've come to reconsider. Can't help but wonder what would 've happened if e.g. the bright minds that worked on the Manhattan Project had occupied themselves with something non-destructive instead...

        Not to mention the heaps of resources wasted that could otherwise be allocated towards infrastructure and general well-being.

    • by JSBiff ( 87824 )

      What if the primary mission for a particular artillery assault is to destroy the enemies weapons factories, and weapons stores, to hasten the end of the war, thereby perhaps saving more lives than are lost?

      It's all well and good to say that these women were in the business of killing, but sometimes, war comes to you, you don't go looking for war. At that point your options are to fight, or to become a victim.

      Put another way, I suppose that from the standpoint of an American, it's better that a German, Itali

      • I'm not debating the value of a crippling war/battle-ending strike nor that of deterrence, at least given the acceptance of war as a valid/unavoidable premise in human interaction.

        My sadness lies in the fact that no-one (OK, few...) stopped to think that "wait, I'm not simply optimizing ways to end the life of a German/Japanese/Italian soldier, I'm assisting in the violent undoing of a member of my own species" and try to stop the madness.

  • by David Off ( 101038 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @05:41AM (#35148584) Homepage

    While you 'Mercans were using women to do ballistics calculations over this side of the pond we had our purpose built babbage difference engines doing the job [wikipedia.org] automatically. What do you mean, the first babbage engine was only completed in 2002 [computerhistory.org]? That's even later than the US arrives for wars!!! :-)

  • Admiral Hopper was a calculator. She worked on the Harvard Mark 1. She was part of the US Navy's Bureau of Ships ballistic calculation project. I am the proud possessor of one of her nanoseconds.
    • by JerryQ ( 923802 )
      So am I, when she was an ambassador for Digital/Dec , she would hand out sachets of ground black pepper, the diameter of each piece was approximately the distance a signal travelled in one nanosecond.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Jean is a very bright and wonderful person. I met her while I was helping to get a Pennsylvania Historic marker at the location in Philadelphia (East Falls) where the UNIVAC computer was built (building is still there). When we had the dedication day all the old veterans from ENIAC and UNIVAC spoke who were still around. Jean is quite a character.

  • and she gave me a really odd look when I said she could do ballistics calculations while doing Yoga.

    wife: "It says WWII, not WII"
  • Well before WWII women computers, including one named Elizabeth Williams [flickr.com] were doing significant work like helping discover Pluto, using mechanical aids such as The Millionaire [flickr.com]
  • After the war my mom took her degree in mathematics to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where she did this kind of work. She said she'd calculate artillery ballistics. She also told me they processed some of the evidence of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, though she wouldn't talk specifics. She turns 89 next week. Happy birthday mom!
  • Am i imagining this? I recall Stephenson writing about people being "computers", in Cryptonomicon. And, of course, it was largely set in WW II Bletchley Park.

     

  • that makes them the earliest cyborgs?
  • I dont want to sound sexist, but the early days of computer programming were viewed as a mere trade-school skill, perhaps due to the large participation of women. I remember MIT faculty arguing about whether to have a computer science department or to offer such a major in one of the existing departments in 1960s and 1970s. "There isnt any real research science in the field". "Its just a trade". Ironically all sort of computer science courses popped in each hard science major at MIT, especially in the MI

Don't tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done. -- James J. Ling

Working...