Posted by Adam Quinan on February 23, 2022 at 18:34:49 user Adam.
In Reply to: Re: Young Ladies' Calculators and Neville Shute's posted by Mike Field on February 23, 2022 at 14:39:15:
Just as the word computer which dates from the 16th century described humans who followed a programmed set of instructions to calculate mathematical values. This was how the first logarithmic and trigonometric tables were developed.
In Victorian times and later women were considered to be very good at this repetitve detailed work and many computers were female. The book (and film) Hidden Figures describes the female African merican women who did most of the calculations in the early days of the US space programme in the 1950s and 1960s.
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