Computing Power Used to Be Measured in 'Kilo-Girls'
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I was thrilled when she told me boys can be programmers, too.
I was a word processor for two or three years before I really got a programming contract.
My dad was a computer programmer and so am I now.
My main project at the moment is a plugin for ChatGPT to be able to program simple websites or web apps that I host on my server for people.
The next generation will also find it interesting that a "computer programmer" used to be a person.
I think it's more likely we'll redefine 'programmer' to mean the person who prompts and evaluates LLM outputs. At least for as long as we need someone to do that; one day we won't, but that means full AGI.
There is no reason to discuss one part of the automated pipeline unless you are troubleshooting it directly. It just collapses into one if it is truly automated.
I don't get it. The implicit scenario described by the OP is that people are talking about “computer programmers” as a matter of practical necessity since they would be surprised when someone mentions the history behind it—they can't be surprised by something if they are discussing it for the history as such.
I've been in an elevator that was being operated by a human.
Some event was letting out, and the bank of elevators had human operators until the crowd cleared. Apparently the automated algorithms aren't quite as efficient in that sort of specialized situation, maybe because they can't talk to the passengers ("Room for two more!").
And that was the norm, until about the 1950s or 1960s when electronics became good-enough to allow those lowly passengers to control lifts for themselves, and save the wage-cost of several full-time employees for each lift. I think the last time I saw a human lift-operator was around the 1980s.
A good lift-operator could judge the lift well enough that there was no lip at all between the lift's floor and the building's floor. Some couldn't and there might be a 6-inch step to make, and that was dangerous. Today, electronics has removed that problem almost entirely and we never think about it.
And then indicating what was on each floor: 'Going up. First floor: home appliances, credit department, crockery and glassware.' And that was apart from listening to questions, being able to tell you which floor you wanted for your purchases, and telling you that you had arrived at that floor.
Of course there were all those lift operator jokes: 'Going up. ladies' dresses. Going down, ladies' underwear.'
At the time there was one computer on the college campus where the program was hosted - all batch, all punched cards, of course, and too valuable to be used for mere number crunching of undergraduate research. By the time I matriculated a year later, the physics department had its own PDP 8, and we did our number crunching on data sets punched onto paper tape, on that. Given the challenges in getting a data set properly punched and the cost of debugging, I'm pretty sure the PDP only saved net people time if you had to run the same computation at least several dozen times.
Yeesh. We've come a long way.
If we aren't doing 'instructions' and can get rid of binary and do decimal adds, say its 1/s, so 1k-g is 1000 'operations' per second.
> Pickering’s successor as director, Harlow Shapley, jokingly quantified the work in terms of the number of ‘kilo-girl hours’ it would take
Pickering himself was teased for having a "harem".
What is true is that there were a lot of human computers, and most of them were girls. I think Feynman, as you would expect from him, played a role in organizing some computer girls for the Manhattan project [2]:
> So we set up this room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant. But she was the multiplier, and she was the adder, and this one cubed, and we had index cards, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one.
> We went through our cycle this way until we got all the bugs out. Well, 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.
[1]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/an-astronomical-feat/
[2]: https://www.f.waseda.jp/sidoli/Feynman_2003.pdf#page=15