Female computers

[Modelworks]

Looking for a documentary to watch on netflix last night I found Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II . If you have not seen this documentary it is well worth the hour if you are even remotely interested in WWII or computers. The title seems odd until you start watching and find out that before computers were machines there was actually a job title called computer. Imagine seeing ads for 'computer wanted' in the jobs classifieds

It covers a lot of stuff I never knew about and has interviews with some of the women who even today remain not well known. They were the ones that crunched the numbers for all the ballistic data in the war, if they miscalculated then someone or many people could die. It starts off with them using slide rules and then talks about how they were the ones to program the very first computer for defense work because nobody else had the knowledge these women did. That is right guys, the first programmers were women. The documentary has some great stories about programming, the machines and the lives these women had. It is shame but they were never given credit in the media for what they did, photos of them working were taken, but never shown in magazines or papers because the military controlled the PR and wanted it to appear as all male. Really good documentary to watch and you have to hurry, netflix is pulling it off on the 15th.

 

[JTsyo]

I heard of this before but didn't they do the math like a assembly line? DO one operation on the problem and then pass it to the next person.

 

[Arcadio]

Very cool. Added to queue.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

I thought they were sitting in a chair behind a small table pressing dot dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot whole day then walk with a little slip to some guy to translate it

Ha found this

Augusta Ada Byron, countess of Lovelace, was a personal friend and student of Babbage. She was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and one of only a few woman mathematicians of her time. She prepared extensive notes concerning Babbage’s ideas and the Analytical Engine. Lovelace’s conceptual programs for the machine led to the naming of a programming language (Ada) in her honor. Although the Analytical Engine was never built, its key concepts, such as the capacity to store instructions, the use of punched cards as a primitive memory, and the ability to print, can be found in many modern computers.