My aunt was a human assembler at NASA (2015)
theregister.com
theregister.com
She too has passed now, and despite being very interested in space as in studying it for a degree I never got to talk with her about what she did.
From what I have read women programmers seemed to be quite rare at NASA, but perhaps not as much.
I'm aware of that. But this was simply a matter of catching up very quickly within a changing field at the time where the new machines had already proven way superior to humans. This wasn't taking place in late 40's but in early 60's - in fact, it was taking place basically at the time when the MIT team was already designing a shoebox-sized computer to shame any human trying to control a spacecraft by hand. And as for "anti-digital", isn't a major plot point of the film an astronaut not trusting a machine's results?
The part where computers aren't magic and won't magically come up with correct answers despite bad input (calculation formulas in this case) was already a well established thing.
EDIT: As for well-knowness of computers - it was early enough in history of computing that Digital Equipment Corporation, despite starting with pretty much a blueprint for good computer, had to carefully ensure that it's first commercial computer didn't call itself a computer. Thus PDP series was born.
Because the title sounds like somebody else wrote the programs in assembly, and her job was to translate assembly instructions into machine code. But according to this sentence, it was "proper" programming, manual translation to machine code was just the last step:
> They’d give us these formulas, and we’d have to translate the mathematics into instructions for the computer.
...and as "hardcore" as it sounds to directly hack machine code into the computer, it's also tedious, slow, error prone and above all: boring. This is how I started too (albeit in the 80's on a home computer), and there's nothing interesting about it except that I still know a couple of Z80 opcodes (how useful!). Once I got my hands on an assembler, productivity skyrocketed (the "productivity jump" between writing a program in machine code and assembler code with a proper macro assembler is bigger than going from assembly code to C (or any other high level language).
I thought she was assembling humans. Which, admittedly, would have been badass.
They were still assembling core memory at that time.
So, NASA was loading hand assembled code into hand assembled memory.
They were doing it the old fashioned way - but the memory was rad hard, which was one of the reasons for staying with that technology.