My Weird Prompts
Daniel Rosehill
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The Women Who Were Computers Before Computers Existed
Before "computer" meant a machine, it was a job title — held for centuries by people, and by the 1940s, mostly by women. This episode reconstructs the actual desk: pre-printed forms, mathematical tables, colored pencils, and mechanical calculators with hand cranks. From the WPA's Mathematical Tables Project, where one or two people in a 450-person workforce could do division, to Los Alamos, where Naomi Livesay rewired IBM plug boards and hand-checked the machine's output, to Bletchley Park's Bombe operators working from footstools. What emerges is a story about designing computation at scale before computers existed — and the factory architecture, error-checking, and even the accounting units (kilogirls, girl-years) that made it work. Key sources: • Bletchley Park Trust, Who were the Codebreakers? — https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/our-story/who-were-the-codebreakers/ • NIST, Prehistory: The Math Tables Project, updated 2022-06-19 — https://www.nist.gov/mathematics-statistics/prehistory-math-tables-project • Wikipedia, Computer (occupation) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computers Episode 5917 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5917 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/881628)
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