Long ago, before there were PCs, before mainframes, before electrified buildings: there were women with notepads.

The word "computer" dates back to the year 1613. In those days, academic researchers who needed the extra help to work out equations would hire students or clerks to help with the majority of the grunt work in order to get calculations usable in a reasonable timeframe. After a couple centuries and an industrial revolution, computers began to move out of study rooms and into government offices, laboratories, and private businesses.

In the 1760s, computers began to be organized into teams in order to perform astronomical calculations. During this period, some of the first mathematical tables were created (yes, like the ones in your textbooks). By the 1780s these techniques were being used to make nautical almanacs for calculating longitude at sea. Successive groups of computers built catalogs of tables and pre-calculated data to make the work go faster. By 1865, teams were growing relatively large, and so — rather than hiring future mathematicians — the scientists heading these departments began to hire women en masse. From this era onward, most researchers built their work on the hands and minds of computers, only rarely allowing the most skilled to advance to become researchers themselves.

The industrialization of computing led to an explosion of use cases for data. Statistics became cheaper and more commonplace, handling and examination of samples could be done simultaneously in parallel, and in the 1870s it was even possible to calculate weather simulations. By the 1910s, fluid dynamics had become so advanced that humans were calculating the stresses on dams (including the Afsluitdijk, which converted the Zuiderzee inlet into Lake Ijssel in the Netherlands).

Around the same time period, large numbers of computers were used to product maps, navigation tables, and artillery tables in World War I. The US Government continued to utilize computers for decades, notably in the Mathematical Tables Project which standardized, modernized, and increased the accuracy of calculations for radio navigation, radar, shockwave propagation, and high-level mathematical functions.

By the 1940s, the work began to be augmented by electronic calculators, when previously computers relied on mechanical calculators and slide rules. Human computers did calculations on nuclear fission for the Manhattan Project, and performed some of the first analyses of flight data for NASA. The first American crewed orbit (sorry Yuri) was made possible through the work of women of color like Dorothy Vaughan. And this achievement is the subject of Margot Lee Shetterly's Significant Figures.

With the development of the ENIAC mainframe, the era of the Human computer began to come to a close. Due to labor shortages during WWII, the first computer programmers: Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas were computers themselves. As programming languages didn't exist yet, the blueprints of the mainframe had to be studied in order to understand which switches would lead to which outcome. From here on, the word "computer" came to mean less about the work of human hands and minds, but instead became the realm of switches, cables, and punchcards. The ENIAC ushered in the era of programmers.

FUN FACT: The first ever computer "bug" was a literal moth found in the Harvard Mk II.

Announcements & Information

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
❤️ Come listen to music with your fellow Hexbears in Cy.tube
💖 Come talk in the New weekly queer thread
🧡 Monthly Neurodiverse Megathread
💛 Read about a current topic in the news
⭐️ May Movie Schedule ⭐️

Reminders:
💚 You can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments and discussions over upbears
💜 Sorting by new makes your comrades happy
🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here

‏‏‎ ‎
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):