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.
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Half a century later, their work is only beginning to get recognition
It was 2003 and Erickson was interviewing sisters Shirley Blumberg Melvin and Doris Blumberg Polsky for her documentary,
2003-1945=58
8/50 - only 16% off - good enough for a male mind.
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2003-1939=64, 28% off.
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Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the women computers. In 1945, she was a recent graduate of Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, the school's one math major. She lived on her parents' farm, refusing the teaching jobs her father suggested, avoiding talk of marrying a farmer and having babies. Bartik was waiting on a job with the military. When a telegram arrived asking her to come right away, she took a late-night train and began new career in Philadelphia.
Besides, the US entered the WWII in 1942 if I'm not mistaken.
Jobs like this started before war? (Score:3)
Besides, the US entered the WWII in 1942 if I'm not mistaken.
Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec 7, 1941 and war was declared on Japan the next day. War was declared on Germany and italy a few days later after they declared.
However the US build up to war had been going on for years. This includes modernizing the army and navy, instituting the draft, ramping up military production, etc. "New" war jobs computing ballistic tables and such could have been created years before actual fighting and declarations of war.
Common practice (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Of course people had to these calculations back then; calculating machines that could do it were yet to be developed.
Mentats?
Gloria Gordon Bolotsky - ENIAC "Rosie" (Score:5, Informative)
"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)
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.
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And even before that Ada Lovelace was probably the first computer programmer.
Operated by women with family in combat ? (Score:3)
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.
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Naval gunnery occurred far more often ... (Score:3)
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]
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Re:Common practice (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Sailors did not do full calculations by hand ... (Score:3)
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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
WHAT!?? SHE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT (Score:4, Funny)
I'm shocked and amazed, if even an amateur historian hasn't heard about this, it must be an amazing discovery
Re:WHAT!?? SHE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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And men were conscripted into the war as soldiers just because they were men. Your assessment is one sided.
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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
Assembly line workers, and nothing more. (Score:1, Insightful)
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
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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)
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....
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.
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Too much focus on the USA (Score:1)
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.
My grandma the programmer. (Score:1)
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My high school teacher was one (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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You also have to remember the rate at which men were dying in battle. Just fucking staggering. :(
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Umm. We might be able to retain more lives and limbs if we celebrate brains as a way of winning wars.
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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.
Increasing casualties (Score:1)
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.
Re:My high school teacher was one -- Patented? (Score:1)
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
Two Thumbs Up (Score:1)
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Depression era unemployment ... (Score:3)
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
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Women aren't being discriminated in the workplace - at least not in the way that feminists think.....
Yes, they pretty much are. The statistics back it up.
it's just that they are a pain in the arse to work with/for and subsequently aren't as successfull.
*puts on flame suit *
Of course you're going to get flamed. You're a sexist douche.
Apparently you've had a bad time working for/with some women. You have taken one or two small anecdotes and generalized to > 50% of the world's population in a way that feed
Re:Two Thumbs Up (Score:5, Interesting)
Please, please use quotes, since the comment you're replying to is modded to invisibility your post just looks schizophrenic.
Anyway, when it comes to the pay...as with most things in life the phrase "it's a little more complicated that that" applies.
women do tend to get paid slightly less.
Women genuinely are less likely to *ask* for more.
I'll dig out the link later but I came across a fascinating study done by an economics professor who looked into the subject in detail.
What prompted her interest was coming across a situation which at first looked like terrible discrimination but turned out to be a little more complicated.
She noticed that of the grad students in the department almost every male was teaching classes and no females were. In academia that's kind of a big deal since it means experience etc etc.
At first glance a simple case of discrimination..... so she went to ask the head of department why he was discriminating against all her female grad students.
And found out the simple reason.
Anyone who'd come to him and asked to teach a class had been given a class to teach.No females had actually asked. The males had.
It wasn't the head of departments fault the women hadn't asked.
So she organised some experiments to look into the phenomenon further.
participants were given a task and at the end were given a small sum of money and asked if they were happy with it.
If they said no got slightly more.
most of the males bargained for more, most of the females did not.
ie: women get less because they ask for less.
but of course still "it's a little more complicated that that" applies.
after even more experiments which included groups who could penalise each other and the opinions of other people was taken into account something else came up.
everyone ( especially women) was more likely to penalise a women who asked for more more than a man who asked for more and their opinions would be more negatively affected by women than men.
so it isn't utterly irrational. Women don't ask for more because they genuinely do get penalised more socially and they themselves penalise people more for the same actions so even when there is no penalty they're less likely to ask for the jobs they want or the extra pay they want.
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Please, please use quotes
In the same vein, please use proper paragraphs.
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Whereas workingwith/for you is all sweetness and light!
Yes well..... (Score:1, Insightful)
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
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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.
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Yes, you are quite right. Singling out only the men (and often only the white men) does us all a great disservice.
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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
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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.
See also "Harvard Computers" (Score:3, Informative)
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]
Makes me think of Feynman (Score:5, Informative)
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 ;)
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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)
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?
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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.
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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.
All the men were off fighting the war (Score:3)
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.
Re:All the men were off fighting the war (Score:4, Interesting)
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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
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And we gloss over the reality of the lives of the less fortunate today.
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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.
Gender aside... (Score:1)
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...
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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.
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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
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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.
Babbage Engines (Score:3)
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!!! :-)
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But something important is being forgotten: war is wrong. It would be immensely better, if at all possible, to gain the enemy by arguments not weapons; to make losses on our side unnecessary and thus achieve a even better outcome than that victory itself brought. The generations which lived before war could have done a better job at keeping peace. Winning a war is actually an empty victory if seen this way; but perhaps the need for better diplomacy could only have been perceived after losing so many lives.
That is a very interesting point of view. Thank you, Neville.
It's a pity we cannot learn more easily oftentimes.
Indeed.
Admiral Grace M. Hopper (Score:1)
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I have met Jean Bartik (Score:1)
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.
I mentioned this to my wife (Score:2)
wife: "It says WWII, not WII"
Pluto Discovery (Score:2)
My mom was a computer too (Score:1)
Neil Stephenson wrote about this in Cryptonomicon (Score:1)
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.
So they were women and computers? (Score:2)
delayed Computer Science degrees at MIT/Stanford (Score:2)