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View attachment 806870 she said ...

actually, I think that pic is of Bletchley Park, where the girls generally worked in their undies,
as the proto-computer got so hot. So were they. And the men who brought the Engima stuff over for processing ...

It's from this excellent piece about women computer scientists-
be honest - how many of them have you heard of?
(My answer is 1, Stephanie Shirley, because of her philanthropic acitvities)

Caching up from a couple of days ago. Thanks for the article about the 10 amazing female computer scientists you've probably never heard of. I have heard of Joan Clarke (Alan Turin was my mathematician hero) and Grace Hopper (I used to program in COBOL - and that really dates me). We need to publicize these overlooked women and there are many more in a variety of scientific fields.
 
View attachment 806870 she said ...

actually, I think that pic is of Bletchley Park, where the girls generally worked in their undies,
as the proto-computer got so hot. So were they. And the men who brought the Engima stuff over for processing ...

It's from this excellent piece about women computer scientists-
be honest - how many of them have you heard of?
(My answer is 1, Stephanie Shirley, because of her philanthropic acitvities)


The pic is of a computer called an ENIAC1.
It was built in the USA in 1946.
Being one of the oldest computers, this is also one of the first computers used for the purpose of war. Although it was completed in 1946, at the end of WWII, it was crucial in helping assist during later conflicts such as the Cold War and Korean War. It was also used to calculate the likelihood of developing the H-bomb, one of the most powerful weapons ever tested.

Interesting Facts:

  • Could add or subtract two ten-digit number at a speed of 5000 per second.
  • Was also capable of advanced division, multiplication, and square-roots.
  • Was capable of storing results of calculations.
  • Was also used to calculate the possibility of producing the H-bomb.
 
View attachment 806870 she said ...

actually, I think that pic is of Bletchley Park, where the girls generally worked in their undies,
as the proto-computer got so hot. So were they. And the men who brought the Engima stuff over for processing ...

It's from this excellent piece about women computer scientists-
be honest - how many of them have you heard of?
(My answer is 1, Stephanie Shirley, because of her philanthropic acitvities)

I'm kind of surprised no one knows about Grace Mary Hopper, the "grandmother of COBOL", the lead inventor of C(ommon)B(usiness)O(riented)L(anguage) (as opposed to FOR(mula)TRAN(slation). She ended up a rear admiral in the United States Navy. The story is she was entering Canada in uniform and the customs guy was staring at it. "US Navy." "You must be the oldest one they've got."
Margaret Hamilton led the programming team for Apollo 11. The code was good enough that they issued warnings when things were backed up. Processors were slow, and these would flash when certain events couldn't be tended to in a certain time interval. It wasn't an issue, it just meant the code had other more important things to do. They started flashing during the descent, and Armstrong asked about it. Hamilton had to tell him not to worry.
Everyone has heard the story about where the term "bug" came from. Pre-transistors, the machines used vacuum tubes. They would blow out a lot, and also generate a lot of heat (leading to the suggestion that the female technicians at Bletchley be allowed to go topless). The also attracted moths, which would blow them out. Hence the term "bug in the machine".
Way back when, there was Ada Lovelace, a collaborator of Charles Babbage and his "computing engine". She had a programming language named after her, which like "Pascal" is now mainly unused.
There is a book by Dava Sobel called "The Glass Universe", about the women at the Harvard Observatory who combed through photographic slides from telescopes looking for motion and anomalies. Apparently the men were generally too impatient to actually do the detailed work required to process the data. Dark matter was discovered by a woman who noticed that something was speeding up rotation at the edges of clusters which according to Newton shouldn't be happening based on the matter that was visible. I actually knew someone who did this kind of thing once, while her husband was getting his astronomy degree. When he got a faculty job, she took a job as a "systems programmer" (someone who knows the code needed to address the actual 'architecture' of the machine--load the contents of this memory location into this register, add register 2 and register 7, etc.--and keeps the machine updated and finds problems). He ended up not getting tenure because the department didn't want to fill up all their slots with permanent people and not be able to bring in new blood. So, he got a law degree. I don't know what happened to her, but I assume she did just fine.
 
I'm kind of surprised no one knows about Grace Mary Hopper, the "grandmother of COBOL", the lead inventor of C(ommon)B(usiness)O(riented)L(anguage) (as opposed to FOR(mula)TRAN(slation). She ended up a rear admiral in the United States Navy. The story is she was entering Canada in uniform and the customs guy was staring at it. "US Navy." "You must be the oldest one they've got."
Margaret Hamilton led the programming team for Apollo 11. The code was good enough that they issued warnings when things were backed up. Processors were slow, and these would flash when certain events couldn't be tended to in a certain time interval. It wasn't an issue, it just meant the code had other more important things to do. They started flashing during the descent, and Armstrong asked about it. Hamilton had to tell him not to worry.
Everyone has heard the story about where the term "bug" came from. Pre-transistors, the machines used vacuum tubes. They would blow out a lot, and also generate a lot of heat (leading to the suggestion that the female technicians at Bletchley be allowed to go topless). The also attracted moths, which would blow them out. Hence the term "bug in the machine".
Way back when, there was Ada Lovelace, a collaborator of Charles Babbage and his "computing engine". She had a programming language named after her, which like "Pascal" is now mainly unused.
There is a book by Dava Sobel called "The Glass Universe", about the women at the Harvard Observatory who combed through photographic slides from telescopes looking for motion and anomalies. Apparently the men were generally too impatient to actually do the detailed work required to process the data. Dark matter was discovered by a woman who noticed that something was speeding up rotation at the edges of clusters which according to Newton shouldn't be happening based on the matter that was visible. I actually knew someone who did this kind of thing once, while her husband was getting his astronomy degree. When he got a faculty job, she took a job as a "systems programmer" (someone who knows the code needed to address the actual 'architecture' of the machine--load the contents of this memory location into this register, add register 2 and register 7, etc.--and keeps the machine updated and finds problems). He ended up not getting tenure because the department didn't want to fill up all their slots with permanent people and not be able to bring in new blood. So, he got a law degree. I don't know what happened to her, but I assume she did just fine.

Well done, Frank. It is a shame that so many women in the STEM fields did not get the recognition they deserved.
 
This is a pic of the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park being operated by two ladies wearing the Park uniform. A hat was also part of the uniform.View attachment 808761

And because I am a congenital geek, this reminds me of the Colossus of New York

0102C7A5-494C-466F-BF4B-FE31A018E3BA.gifF8D2B818-5EA7-4CE6-A301-FE5150151DB6.gif

and this.

 
and this.

hmmm I very dimly remember that...
Thanks for the article about the 10 amazing female computer scientists you've probably never heard of

Out of those it was Hamilton and Hopper I'd heard of (well I may have 'heard' of some of the others but forgot...)

Now of course, before there were electronic computers, there was already a considerable and constantly increasing economic demand for large scale computation, quite noticeably so by the first decades of the 20th century -- insurance companies for instance were a major client -- and this was done by 'computers', as in people who computed - there would be lots of them crammed into a hall side by side at their desks and this would mostly be women.

Also as I've heard the stories told, many creators of everyday 'software' in the very early days (punch cards & core memory etc) were women, as in those days the prestigious deeds were done in hardware development, and perhaps things like cryptanalysis. It was only at a later stage that 'software' (which already sounds suspiciously squishy) became a prestigious, supercompetitive arena.
 
Now of course, before there were electronic computers, there was already a considerable and constantly increasing economic demand for large scale computation, quite noticeably so by the first decades of the 20th century -- insurance companies for instance were a major client -- and this was done by 'computers', as in people who computed - there would be lots of them crammed into a hall side by side at their desks and this would mostly be women.
And the early days of the space program, as depicted in the movie "Hidden Figures"
 
The also attracted moths, which would blow them out. Hence the term "bug in the machine".
This, if Wiki is to be believed, is the original bug

1579550335618.png

It's good to see Ada Lovelace mentioned in her own right,
apart from being Byron's daughter -

Augusta Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and his wife Lady Byron. All of Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever four months later. He commemorated the parting in a poem that begins, "Is thy face like thy mother's my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?" He died of disease in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old. Her mother remained bitter and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Ada remained interested in Byron, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her eventual death, she was buried next to him at her request.
 
And because I am a congenital geek, this reminds me of the Colossus of New York

View attachment 808897View attachment 808898

and this.

I have a book which I've skimmed (I should read more) that claims that the first ELECTRONIC computer was invented by a physics professor in Ames, Iowa, in the 1930's, named Atanasoff, and the creators of ENIAC stole his ideas.
This is what "computing" was like in 1960: https://macbirmingham.co.uk/event/the-apartment-cinema-rediscovered
Even earlier, on the Manhattan Project, Feynman in "Los Alamos from Below" says that he got his job managing the calculation group (using mechanical "Hollerith" machines to do the repetitive, time-consuming arithmetic behind the formulas) because the original director got the "computer disease" and kept doing computational problems that had never been possible before and neglected the calculations required for the bomb.
There is also a book called "What the Doormouse Said" that claims that computing was brought to the masses from corporation monopolists like IBM by a bunch of '60's counterculture types who played around with processors (like Atari's) designed for games. One such college dropout named Bill Gates worked for Atari for a while but clashed with the founder. He was more than a geek--he had a lot of JD Rockefeller in him. He bought DOS from the business insouicant inventor and Microsoft tried to build a new monopoly before various government types stopped him. Even this visionary saw technology pass him by. When there was discussion about how big the word size should be (it matters because it determines how much memory one can "address") he asserted that "no one would ever need 1 MEG".
Now things are so fast that the web and things like Java can be very inefficient to allow "developers" to work more with concepts than details and stitch together pre-written pieces of code knowing what goes in and what comes out without knowing how they work exactly, and let the machine handle the technical details.
All of this has come in just 60-70 years. There have been parallel developments in gene sequencing and microscopy (you can "see" atoms now) and "materials", which also in part rely on fast computation.
Fortunately, the pieces keep getting cheaper, so it is somewhat difficult (despite Amazon and Google) to prevent people from implementing new ideas by patenting all the tools.
 
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