A new book about the history of the pocket calculator

[carey]

(06-09-2024 08:33 PM)bxparks Wrote:  For example, this is the first time I am reading about departments composed of human "computers", mostly women: "Harvard College Observatory [...] hired its first female computer in 1875, and by 1880, the entire computing staff was made up of women. But this was not quite the victory for equality that it appeared to be. Harvard's female computers were paid only half the wages of their male predecessors." I guess this became common enough between WWI and WWII that in 1944, "a member of the U.S. National Department Research Committee [referred] to a unit of computing power as a kilo-girl."

Yes, human computers were employed well past WWII. In fact, until 1970 at Langley (see NASA's history page, and the book "When Computers Were Human" by David Alan Grier, and the Hidden Figures book made into a popular movie with the-famous scene depicting human computer Katherine Johnson employing Euler's method (embedded in this nice YouTube video in which UCLA Professor Alan Garfinkel discusses it) to compute John Glenn's re-entry trajectory.