Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII | Hacker News Reader

Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII

en.wikipedia.org

66 pointsjacquesm33 comments

Okay so the Rosie name is apparently a reference[0] to Rosie the Riveter[1].

I was originally wondering if Rosie[2] from The Jetsons was named after these ladies as a reference, but apparently the "ie" spelling was a season 2 change and so probably unrelated.

0: http://www.topsecretrosies.com/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter

2: https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Rosey

Similar ones:

"Code girls : the untold story of the American women code breakers of World War II" (2017) https://g.co/kgs/CBSxQv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Girls

"Hidden Figures" (2016) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures https://g.co/kgs/m2fFvN

Women in science : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science

Also, the British Women Royal Naval Service serving in Western Approaches Tactical Unit during WWII, who developed a great number of extremely effective tactics for fighting U-boats, as well as effectively reverse engineering bits and pieces of German technology that had never been physically seen by analyzing the tactics of their employment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Approaches_Tactical_Un...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVet82IUAqQ

I loved Hidden Figures, but even more so I loved hearing stories of little girls who saw it and spent the next few days playing "Scientist". Showing history inspires the future.

I just started reading the Lady Astronaut sci-fi series last night, starting with "The Calculating Stars", and its main character is a female "computer". Really interesting perspective I haven't seen in sci-fi before.

The acknowledgements at the end and bibliography/recommended reading list for her research was interesting, too.

Cool post! I seem to remember reading some of Richard Feynman’s writing about this: people doing computations on cards and then “passing them on” to the next person - think it was during the Manhattan Project. It is phenomenal how far computing has come; i like hearing about people using punch cards for computing etc

The associated documentary is "free" to stream on Kanopy. We enjoyed it.

"Top Secret Rosies: The Female “Computers” of WWII" (2010) https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/122786 https://g.co/kgs/49A9bD

The "computers" we are familiar with were originally called "automatic computers" to distinguish them from the earlier human "computers". Later the "automatic" was dropped and forgotten.

I'd be interested in a reference (preferrably historical) on how to do these computations by hand. Was it all done by looking up in evaluated function tables?

The quotes around computers is kind of annoying because they are actual computers and the machines we use are "computers"

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