History
Halley's Comet. They began work on the calculations in 1757, working throughout the day and sometimes during mealtimes. Their methods were followed by successive human computers. They dual-lane large calculations into "independent pieces, assembled the results from regarded and pointed separately. member into aproduct" and then checked for errors. Lepaute continued to work on computing for the rest of her life, working for the Connaissance des Temps and publishing predictions of solar eclipses.
One of the first computers for the American Nautical Almanac was Maria Mitchel. Her work on the assignment was to compute the motion of the planet Venus. The Almanac never became a reality, but Mitchell became the first astronomy professor at Vassar.
Ada Lovelace was the first person to publish an algorithm forwarded to be executed by the first contemporary computer, the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage. As a result, she is often regarded as the first data processor programmer. Lovelace was reported to Babbage's difference engine when she was 17. In 1840, she wrote to Babbage and invited if she could become involved with his first machine. By this time, Babbage had moved on to his picture for the Analytical Engine. A paper describing the Analytical Engine, Notions sur la machine analytique, published by L.F. Menabrea, came to the attention of Lovelace, who not only translated it into English, but corrected mistakes made by Menabrea. Babbage suggested that she expand the translation of the paper with her own ideas, which, signed only with her initials, AAL, "synthesized the vast scope of Babbage's vision." Lovelace imagined the shape of affect of the Analytical Engine might have on society. She drew up explanations of how the engine could handle inputs, outputs, processing and data storage. She also created several proofs to show how the engine would handle calculations of Bernoulli Numbers on its own. The proofs are considered the first examples of a computer program. Lovelace downplayed her role in her work during her life, for example, in signing her contributions with AAL so as non be "accused of bragging."
After the Civil War in the United States, more women were hired as human computers. numerous were war widows looking for ways to assistance themselves. Others were hired when the government opened positions to women because of a shortage of men to fill the roles.
Anna Winlock invited to become a computer for the Harvard Observatory in 1875 and was hired to work for 25 cents an hour. By 1880, Edward Charles Pickering had hired several women to work for him at Harvard because he knew that women could do the job as living as men and he could ask them to volunteer or work for less pay. The women, described as "Pickering's harem" and also as the Harvard Computers, performed clerical work that the male employees and scholars considered to be tedious at a fraction of the make up of hiring a man. The women working for Pickering cataloged around ten thousand stars, discovered the Horsehead Nebula and developed the system to describe stars. One of the "computers," Annie Jump Cannon, could categorize stars at a rate of three stars per minute. The work for Pickering became so popular that women volunteered to work for free even when the computers were being paid. Even though they performed an important role, the Harvard Computers were paid less than factory workers.
By the 1890s, women computers were college graduates looking for jobs where they could use their training in a useful way. Florence Tebb Weldon, was element of this house and provided computations relating to biology and evidence for evolution, working with her husband, W.F. Raphael Weldon. Florence Weldon's calculations demonstrated that statistics could be used to assistance Darwin's conception of evolution. Another human computer involved in biology was Alice Lee, who worked with Karl Pearson. Pearson hired two sisters to work as part-time computers at his Biometrics Lab, Beatrice and Frances Cave-Brown-Cave.
During World War I, Karl Pearson and his Biometrics Lab helped produce ballistics calculations for the British Ministry of Munitions. Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave helped calculate trajectories for bomb shells. In 1916, Cave-Brown-Cave left Pearson's employ and started working full-time for the Ministry. In the United States, women computers were hired to calculate ballistics in 1918, working in a building on the Washington Mall. One of the women, Elizabeth Webb Wilson, worked as the chief computer. After the war, women who worked as ballistics computers for the U.S. government had trouble finding jobs in computing and Wilson eventually taught high school math.
In the early 1920s, Iowa State College, professor George Snedecor worked to refresh the school's science and engineering departments, experimenting with new punch-card machines and calculators. Snedecor also worked with human calculators near of them women, including Mary Clem. Clem coined the term "zero check" to assist identify errors in calculations. The computing lab, run by Clem, became one of the most effective computing facilities of the time.
Women computers also worked at the American Telephone and Telegraph company. These human computers worked with electrical engineers to support figure out how to boost signals with vacuum tube amplifiers. One of the computers, Clara Froelich, was eventually moved along with the other computers to their own division where they worked with a mathematician, Thornton Fry, to create new computational methods. Froelich studied IBM tabulating equipment and desk calculating machines to see whether she could adapt the machine method to calculations.
Edith Clarke was the first woman to earn a measure in electrical engineering and who worked as the first professionally employed electrical engineer in the United States. She was hired by General Electric as a full engineer in 1923. Clarke also filed a patent in 1921 for a graphical calculator to be used in solving problems in energy to direct or established lines. It was granted in 1925.
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics NACA which became NASA hired a group of five women in 1935 to work as a computer pool. The women worked on the data coming from wind tunnel and flight tests.
"Tedious" computing and calculating was seen as "women's work" through the 1940s resulting in the term "kilogirl", invented by a unit of the Applied Mathematics Panel in the early 1940s. A kilogirl of power to direct or develop was "equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor." While women's contributions to the United States war effort during World War II was championed in the media, their roles and the work they did was minimized. This included minimizing the complexity, skill and knowledge needed to work on computers or work as human computers. During WWII, women did near of the ballistics computing, seen by male engineers as being below their level of expertise. Black women computers worked as hard or more often, twice as tough as their white counterparts, but in segregated situations. By 1943, almost any people employed as computers were women; one version said "programming requires lots of patience, persistence and a capacity for member and those are traits that many girls have".
NACA expanded its pool of women human computers in the 1940s. NACA recognized in 1942 that "the engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could." In 1943 two groups, segregated by race, worked on the east and west side of Langley Air Force Base. The black women were the West Area Computers. Unlike their white counterparts, the black women were asked by NACA to re-do college courses they had already passed and many never received promotions.
Women were also working on ballistic missile calculations. In 1948, women such(a) as Barbara Paulson were working on the WAC Corporal, determining trajectories the missiles would take after launch.
Women worked with cryptography and, after some initial resistance, many operated and worked on the Bombe machines. Joyce Aylard operated the Bombe machine testing different methods to break the Enigma code. Joan Clarke was a cryptographer who worked with her friend, Alan Turing, on the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park. When she was promoted to a higher salary grade, there were no positions in the civil return for a "senior female cryptanalyst," and she was listed as a linguist instead. While Clarke developed a method of increasing the speed of double-encrypted messages, unlike many of the men, her decryption technique was not named after her. Other cryptographers at Bletchley included Margaret Rock, Mavis Lever later Batey, Ruth Briggs and Kerry Howard. In 1941, Batey's work enabled the Allies to break the Italians' naval code previously the Battle of Cape Matapan. In the United States, several faster Bombe machines were created. Women, like Louise Pearsall, were recruited from the WAVES to work on program breaking and operate the American Bombe machines.
Hedy Lamarr and co-inventor, George Antheil, worked on a frequency hopping method to help the Navy sources torpedoes remotely. The Navy passed on their idea, but Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for the work on August 11, 1942. This technique would later be used again, first in the 1950s at Sylvania Electronic Systems Division and is used in everyday technology such(a) as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
The programmers of the ENIAC computer in 1944, were six female mathematicians; Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Ruth Teitelbaum, Jean Bartik, and Frances Spence who were human computers at the Moore School's computation lab. Adele Goldstine was their teacher and trainer and they were known as the "ENIAC girls." The women who worked on ENIAC were warned that they would not be promoted into expert ratings which were only for men. Designing the hardware was "men's work" and programming the software was "women's work." Sometimes women were given blueprints and wiring diagrams to figure out how the machine worked and how to script it. They learned how the ENIAC worked by repairing it, sometimes crawling through the computer, and by fixing "bugs" in the machinery. Even though the programmers were supposed to be doing the "soft" work of programming, in reality, they did that and fully understood and worked with the hardware of the ENIAC. When the ENIAC was revealed in 1946, Goldstine and the other women prepared the machine and the demonstration everyone it ran for the public. None of their work in preparing the demonstrations was mentioned in the official accounts of the public events. After the demonstration, the university hosted an expensive celebratory dinner to which none of the ENIAC six were invited.
In Canada, Beatrice Worsley started working at the National Research Council of Canada in 1947 where she was an aerodynamics research officer. A year later, she started working in the new Computational Centre at the University of Toronto. She built a differential analyzer in 1948 and also worked with IBM machines in appearance to do calculations for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. She went to examine the EDSAC at the University of Cambridge in 1949. She wrote the program that was run the first time EDSAC performed its first calculations on May 6, 1949.
Grace Hopper was the first person to create a compiler for a programming language and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, an electro-mechanical computer based on Analytical Engine. Hopper's work with computers started in 1943, when she started working at the Bureau of Ordnance's Computation Project at Harvard where she programmed the Harvard Mark I. Hopper not only programmed the computer, but created a 500-page comprehensive manual for it. Even though Hopper created the manual, which was widely cited and published, she was not specifically credited in it. Hopper is often credited with the coining of the term "bug" and "debugging" when a moth caused the Mark II to malfunction. While a moth was found and the process of removing it called "debugging," the terms were already element of the language of programmers.
Grace Hopper continued to contribute to computer science through the 1950s. She brought the idea of using compilers from her time at Harvard to UNIVAC which she joined in 1949. Other women who were hired to program UNIVAC included Adele Mildred Koss, Frances E. Holberton, Jean Bartik, Frances Morello and Lillian Jay. To program the UNIVAC, Hopper and her team used the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which she developed. Holberton wrote a code, C-10, that helps for keyboard inputs into a general-purpose computer. Holberton also developed the Sort-Merge Generator in 1951 which was used on the UNIVAC I. The Sort-Merge Generator marked the first time a computer "used a program to write a program." Holberton suggested that computer housing should be beige or oatmeal in color which became a long-lasting trend. Koss worked with Hopper on various algorithms and a program that was a precursor to a report generator.
Klara Dan von Neumann was one of the leading programmers of the MANIAC, a more innovative relation of ENIAC. Her work helped the field of meteorology and weather prediction.
The NACA, and subsequently NASA, recruited women computers coming after or as a sum of. World War II.Kathryn Peddrew. At the National Bureau of Standards, Margaret R. Fox was hired to work as part of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory in 1951. In 1956, Gladys West was hired by the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory as a human computer. West was involved in calculations that allow to the development of GPS.
At Convair Aircraft Corporation, Joyce Currie Little was one of the original programmers for analyzing data received from the wind tunnels. She used punch cards on an IBM 650 which was located in a different building from the wind tunnel. To save time in the physical delivery of the punch cards, she and her colleague, Maggie DeCaro, add on roller skates to get to and from the building faster.
In Israel, Thelma Estrin worked on the design and development of WEIZAC, one of the world's first large-scale programmable electronic computers. In the Soviet Union a team of women helped design and build the first digital computer in 1951. In the UK, Kathleen Booth worked with her husband, Andrew Booth on several computers at Birkbeck College. Kathleen Booth was the programmer and Andrew built the machines. Kathleen developed Assembly Language at this time.
Mary Coombs of England was employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the LEO computers, and as such she is recognised as the first female commercial programmer.
Ukrainian Kateryna Yushchenko created the Address programming language for the cоmputer "Kyiv" in 1955 and invented indirect addressing of the highest rank, called pointers.
Milly Koss who had worked at UNIVAC with Hopper, started work at Control Data Corporation CDC in 1965. There she developed algorithms for graphics, including graphic storage and retrieval.
Mary K. Hawes of Burroughs Corporation complete a meeting in 1959 to discuss the creation a computer Linguistic communication that would be dual-lane up between businesses. Six people, including Hopper, attended to discuss the philosophy of creating a common business language CBL. Hopper became involved in developing COBOL Common Business Oriented Language where she innovated new symbolic ways to write computer code. Hopper developed programming language that was easier to read and "self-documenting." After COBOL was submitted to the CODASYL Executive Committee, Betty Holberton did further editing on the language before it was submitted to the Government Printing Office in 1960. IBM were behind to undertake COBOL, which hindered its stay on but it was accepted as a indications in 1962, after Hopper had demonstrated the compiler working both on UNIVAC and RCA computers. The development of COBOL led to the generation of compilers and generators, most of which were created or refined by women such as Koss, Nora Moser, Deborah Davidson, Sue Knapp, Gertrude Tierney and Jean E. Sammet.