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.

Comments

Common practice

[Chris Mattern]

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.

WHAT!?? SHE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT

[nzap]

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

Re:WHAT!?? SHE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT

[cptdondo]

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.

My high school teacher was one

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

 

Gloria Gordon Bolotsky - ENIAC "Rosie"

[Joren]

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."

Makes me think of Feynman

[tibit]

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 ;)

The "real" feminists

[acidradio]

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?

Re:Two Thumbs Up

[HungryHobo]

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.

No in fact

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.