David Alan Grier (1) (1955–)

I once looked up "computer" in a 1937 dictionary and read "one who computes". This book is a nice, if dry, history about those who computed in the days before digital took over...astronomy, navigation, ballistics, weather, census...the math tables are mind boggling, and I used many (Chemical Rubber Company anyone?)

I had a little nostalgia in the last chapter...Grier talked about two mainframes that marked the definite end to human computing - the IBM 360 and UNIVAC 1108 - both of which I wrote assembly language code for. I still remember that the UNIVC had 36 bit words.… (altro)

Once upon a time, "computer" was a job description, rather than a machine. That much I knew, and that most "computers" were women. Grier, himself a mathematician became interested in the subject when his grandmother offhandedly mentioned "you know, I took calculus once" - unfortunately he didn't realize until later just how remarkable that statement was for a woman of her age.

Grier talks about how the tedium of numerical analysis done by hand and the need for jobs during the Great Depression conspired to create the Mathematical Tables project - a WPA-funded project of teams of mostly women, doing simple, repetitive calculations all day long. Mathematicans broke down complex calculations into small pieces which were doled out according to difficulty (most people only performed additions, a rare few did divisions) and used to compile massive tables of useful numbers for use by scientists and engineers. He follows the history of "computers" up through World War II, where the overarching computations that computers worked on were highly classified, with individuals being forbidden from talking even to each other about what they were doing while adding or multiplying numbers that together solved complicated equations for nuclear physics and explosion mechanisms. The book concludes with the development of electronic computers and the obsolescence of human "computers", and speculates about whether computer programming will be similarly obsolete in another two generations.… (altro)