The first computer programmers were women - Top Secret Rosies (documentary)
I would like to suggest the documentary Top Secret Rosies, which is available through APT (American Public Television, Inc). This is a subject that is important to me as a female computer programmer. I learned my first of over a dozen computer languages in 1978. Every computer language I learned, whether in a class of from a book for work, started with a history of computers. So over and over again I learned about the ENIAC, about why it was made, about how it worked. Never once did I learn that the original programmers were six women. I would have liked to know that considering that in 1978 I was the only girl in the class.
I am in no way affiliated with this film. My interest in suggesting this documentary is even as more and more women are computer programmers it is still a male dominated field. I have two daughters and I would like them to know that they can learn the same things that males can.
Website: http://topsecretrosies.wordpress.com/
Summary from website:
In 1942…
… soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a secret military program was launched to recruit women to the war effort. But unlike the efforts to recruit Rosie to the factory, this search targeted female mathematicians who would become human ‘computers’ for the US military. From the bombing of Axis Europe to the assaults on Japanese strongholds, the women worked round-the-clock shifts creating ballistics tables that proved crucial to Allied success. Rosie made the weapons, but the female computers made them accurate. When the first electronic computer (ENIAC) was invented to aid the Army’s ballistic calculation efforts, six of these women were tapped to become its first programmers. While the work of these human computers proved crucial to allied victory, it also carried a moral weight - how to square the larger issue of ending a world war against the personal recognition that their mathematical computations made every Allied bomb and gun more deadly.
Fall 2010 marks the 65th anniversary of the end of WWII, yet the amazing account of these women remains untold, until now. Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII shares a story of the women and technology that helped win a war and usher in the modern computer age.
(This has also been posted at my FaceBook and my Twitter.)
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