This is a particularly fun exercise when you recall that the original "computers" were people doing arithmetic, not at all dissimilarly to what’s done here, just with less parallelism. Though they did at least have mechanical adders and multipliers!
We needed a man to repair the machines, to keep them going and everything. And the army was always going to send this fellow they had, but he was always delayed.
Now, we always were in a hurry. Everything we did, we tried to do as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we worked out all the numerical steps that the machines were supposed to do — multiply this, and then do this, and subtract that. Then we worked out the program, but we didn’t have any machine to test it on. So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant: one was the multiplier, another was the adder. This one cubed — all she did was cube a number on an index card and send it to the next girl.
We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. It turned out that the speed at which we were able to do it was a hell of a lot faster than the other way, where every single person did all the steps. We got speed with this system that was the predicted speed for the IBM machine. The only difference is that the IBM machines didn’t get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos....
".. Based on the unbelievably true life stories of three of these women, known as "human computers", we follow these women as they quickly rose the ranks of NASA..."
> mathematicians that served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in U.S. history
In this case, aren't they more like hands than brains?
The brains should be the ones who created the code. These people are just processing it, it's like manual labor.
They used their brains to perform the calculations, I don't see how you could see it otherwise.
Is the McDonald's cashier the "brains behind the operation" because they count change as part of their duties?
Counting change accurately is very important to the continued successful operation of a retail establishment. But it's menial work.
Even Wikipedia agrees with me:
> Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail."
I think the term "human computer" is extremely misleading without the cultural context behind the term, i.e. that these people were essentially doing 5th grade math worksheets all day. Reading numbers, plugging them into a calculator (yes, really), and writing down the results.
Usually we call these mechanical turks?
The work could require superhuman endurance, though. “They had to keep working eight hours a day doing the same equation over and over again—it must have been mind-numbing,” notes Paul Ceruzzi, author of Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer.
from [this](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...) article
If I take the words of Alan Turing then your interpretation of menial work, then programming is menial work too. You have fixed rules that you can't deviate from. Is all programming really menial? I would argue that it can be very mentally taxing, the same way math or any intellectual work can be.
At its bases, NASA employed nearly 80 black women as computers, says Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures. One of them, Katherine Johnson, was so revered for her abilities that in 1962, John Glenn asked her to personally verify the flight path of his first launch into space on the Friendship 7 mission. The astronauts didn’t trust the newfangled digital computers, which were prone to crashing. Glenn wanted human eyes on the problem.
“They had a tremendous amount of respect for these women and their mathematical abilities,” says Shetterly. “The male engineers often were not good mathematicians. So the women made their work possible.” Still, some friction existed. Women who asked for promotions got stonewalled or turned down: “For women who wanted to move up, who wanted to be supervisors—particularly if that involves supervising men? Not so much.”
The women wouldn't have been employed without the engineering work, but the engineering work wouldn't have been possible without these women. They were equally the brains behind getting things to space. A sizable number of these women later became programmers, because building the computers was seen as the really difficult task. Coding was dull work. Writing code that gets people safely to the moon and back was obviously trivial.
Which art?