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The Women Who Were Computers Before Computers Existed
Before "computer" meant a machine, it was a job title — held for centuries by people, and by the 1940s, mostly by women. This episode reconstructs the actual desk: pre-printed forms, mathematical tables, colored pencils, and mechanical calculators with hand cranks. From the WPA's Mathematical Tables Project, where one or two people in a 450-person workforce could do division, to Los Alamos, where Naomi Livesay rewired IBM plug boards and hand-checked the machine's output, to Bletchley Park's Bombe operators working from footstools. What emerges is a story about designing computation at scale…
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