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Rediscovering WWII's Top-Secret Computing 'Rosies'
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.
I think we should look up some of these women to helps calculate how long ago WWII was.
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.
I'm shocked and amazed, if even an amateur historian hasn't heard about this, it must be an amazing discovery
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 during WWII.
More films about computer history are a good thing. But it's not accurate for the original poster to say "their work is only beginning to get recognition" .... maybe the subject was new to the film maker, but historians have been writing about this for decades.
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.
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.
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?
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 general ogres) so the level of ignorance is not surprising.
And of course, the human computors would be organised as a distributed processing system, each responsible for what in effect would be a subroutine in the process that resulted in a complete ballistic computation. Its just repetitive work, after all. My regard would be reserved for the people who produced the work schemes in the first place - they were the real programmers!
And programming ENIAC?
More rote work, wiring up plugboards. Essential but not groundbreaking.
Both men and women performed essential war work at all levels in both Britain and the US. They ALL deserve recognition for a job that shouldn't have needed doing. Singling out an individual group does a disservice to the rest.
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
Wanna tell you a story
'Bout a woman I know
When it comes to lovin'
Oh she steals the show
She ain't exactly pretty
Ain't exactly small
Forty-two, thirty-nine, fifty-six
You could say she's got it all
Never had a woman
Never had a woman like you
Doing all the things
Doing all the things you do
Ain't no fairy story
Ain't no skin and bone
But you give it all you got
Weighing in at nineteen stone
CHORUS:
You're a whole lotta woman
A whole lotta woman
Whole lotta Rosie x3
And you're a whole lotta woman
Oh honey you can do it
Do it to me all night long
Only one to turn
Only one to turn me on
All through the night time
And right around the clock
To my surprise
Rosie never stops
You're a whole lotta woman
A whole lotta woman
Whole lotta Rosie x3
And you're a whole lotta woman
Oh, and Slashdot coders... HTML OR pre-formatted! Why the hell are you rendering HTML break tags and LFs in the comment box?!
Randomly saw this article from 2009 a few minutes before seeing this Slashdot story. Seems she had quite the career:
"Gloria Gordon Bolotsky 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."
-- Joren
When Feynman was setting up discretized integrations 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 ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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?
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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...
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 automatically. What do you mean, the first babbage engine was only completed in 2002? That's even later than the US arrives for wars!!! :-)
Of course, past glories are pleasant to remember -- especially if the war was won; but even so otherwise.
Of course, acknowledgement is important, if not more then at least for the sake of thanking those whose efforst saved our a, erm, lives. This is particularly useful when we realize such important tasks were done by women, who traditionally are scorned as being less endowed as their male equivalents. Obviously this example sets an important illustration of gender irrelevance (in fact, the exact opposite could be argued: that men are more expendable).
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.
It's a pity we cannot learn more easily oftentimes.
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 the nearest kindergarten class to bring crayons to mark dots on a big piece of paper on the wall.
Is this patented yet?
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.
I thought women were only good for multiplication!
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
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"
I like microcars
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.
Well before WWII women computers, including one named Elizabeth Williams were doing significant work like helping discover Pluto, using mechanical aids such as The Millionaire
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.
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!
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 on dry land were calculating.
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
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.
I like to think of my grandmother as the first member of my family to have programmed a computer. My grandmother worked with a team of women on an electro-mechanical computer during WWII as part of an anti-aircraft battery. She mentioned that there were six input stations and that her job was to ensure that the information received from a form of radar (and other inputs?) was fed into the system and to perform a quick calculation to help validate the output. After turning some dials, numbers were relayed to the gunners (verbally, I believe). Before D-Day her AA unit was stationed in England and a few months later moved into Belgium. Her unit was there until near the very end of the war in Europe.
She was 19 when she joined. Apparently she was assigned the job due to her scores on aptitude tests. She met my grandfather in that artillery unit; he was her sergeant.
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 considered making sure returning vets got a job to be part of the "thank you" to those who made the greater sacrifices. Others may have been more practical and thought it better that those who were trained and well practiced in the use of weapons should be employed first. Don't laugh, this was the era of red scares and "communist revolt". The US did not help to rebuild Europe and Japan purely out of generosity and compassion, there was a very strong political stability motivation.
that makes them the earliest cyborgs?
You've been turfed.
The "Rosies" are nothing new. I remember mention of them in a book called "Between Silk and Cyanide".
The only new information here is that LeAnn Erickson directed a documentary about it, and CNN interviewed her about that.
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 MIT business department, when it would have made more sense to centralize the discipline. Plus some of the most desirable non-affiliated laboratories on campus were computers science - MAC and A.I. Eventually E.E. offered C.S. as a sub-major (course 6.3) and added the name to the E.E. department title in the 1980s. But it never a department in its own right. Ironically this computing sub-major has had the largest enrollment on campus for the past quarter century, up to 40% of undergraduates at times.
The debate is not over yet. MIT requires all students, even music majors, to take six semesters of calculus and science, pretty much same requirement for the past 50 years. There is a reform proposal to allow students to take a computer course instead of Physics-2, but it hasnt been voted in yet.
Stanford had a similar debate too. But eventally created a full blown computer department in the 1970s.
The Ultra-Ultra secret is that the Brits didn't break the Enigma on their own. Before the war, Poles developed the technology to break the Enigma when it was a commercial device. They even invented a machine that would check for keys and stop on a possible solution. When Poland fell, they brought the technology to England. The Germans added wheels for increased complexity, so the techniques had to be updated. But the basic principle of breaking the cipher remained the same.
BTW, the Colossus was invented to crack a cipher nicknamed Tuny. (A different system than the Enigma.) Like the ABC, the Colossus was an electronic-mechanical hybrid. Still looking for a block diagram of its architecture.
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.
Or the inventors of Machine Code?
I know plenty of women who programmed during and post WW2. Why is it such a shocker? Plenty of women were/are in the army and do non-combat jobs. Computing is one of them. There is also nurses, doctors, cooks, ect... I'm sure a few go in infantry/artillery too.
I teach High School Computer Science.
I'm tired of everyone assuming that Computers are "a man's game."
I need more resources to get more female students into class. The vast majority of young ladies do excellent work in Computer Science. (Computer Science not Office, etc.)
Many are surprised when they "out shine" the boys, many boys are surprised when the girls "out shine" the boys.
Sources like this may help open a great world for the young ladies.
If it makes any difference I'm male and over 65. Sometimes, I like to "wow" the kids with the 'the way it used to be' stories. They can't believe it.