[HN Gopher] Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII
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Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII
Author : jacquesm
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-08-10 20:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| dieselgate wrote:
| Cool post! I seem to remember reading some of Richard Feynman's
| writing about this: people doing computations on cards and then
| "passing them on" to the next person - think it was during the
| Manhattan Project. It is phenomenal how far computing has come; i
| like hearing about people using punch cards for computing etc
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Because then they'd have to make a movie about female
| scientists in WWII and the Manhattan project and how male
| scientists were happy to work with them and make use of them.
| The computers were not significant contributors -- they were
| replaceable people doing menial calculations.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > they were replaceable people doing menial calculations
|
| That was my impression, too. Is it accurate?
| macintux wrote:
| At least one computer helped found an entire field of
| physics.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411769
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Born in 1928, an undergrad in 1951, if she was working as a
| teenager as a "computer" in WWII, that was menial
| calculation.
| macintux wrote:
| Not WWII, but shortly after, hired in 1952 as a computer.
| msoucy wrote:
| Because too many people assume that only men were involved in
| the effort? I'm not sure why a documentary about women would
| "alienate your audience"...
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Invoking "wokeism" doesn't help to make your case. If
| anything it weakens it. Documentaries and books do not need
| to be total in their coverage, they have limited space (in
| the literal sense and the temporal sense) in which to
| convey information. Consider something like this as adding
| to the larger body of documentation on the history of math
| and computing and the role of women in both. Because that's
| what it does, it adds, not subtracts. It doesn't erase
| anything that existed prior to it or since, it doesn't
| erase the (very well documented) role of men in these
| efforts.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| > It doesn't erase anything, it just excludes historic
| contributions to one gender.
|
| If a documentary covers a specific topic it makes sense
| that it wouldn't cover another topic. The Cancer
| documentary isn't somehow woke for not being about AIDS.
| I don't see anything weird about a documentary that is
| about women computing in WWII not being about male
| computing in WWII. I'd totally agree with you if the
| documentary was claiming to cover computing in WWII
| generally and then only covered women, but that's not
| what's happening here.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| If men didn't serve as human computer contributors to
| WWII then I agree, it's not an issue.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Unfortunately wrong for the whole thread.
|
| "Top Secret Rosies is the _as-yet-untold_ story... "
|
| https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/122786
|
| Despite being a fan of history and WWII, with female
| veterans in the family I'd never heard of these folks,
| ever. Not one peep. Apparently it was secret or
| something?! Came across the doc on Kanopy at random and
| it looked like a good one to watch with a young person.
|
| If you'd have seen it you'd know it is ~0% woke. All the
| people interviewed are not even boomers, they're the
| "greatest generation" simply telling their stories.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| This documentary was made in or before 2010, that was
| even before woke existed as a slang term.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| But the documentary doesn't claim to be about human
| computer contributors. It claims to be about women
| specifically. It's super weird to critique a historical
| documentary for being focused in its scope. Should we
| also critique "Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.", a
| documentary about a specific uprising in a specific
| extermination camp? Is Wings of Defeat, which is
| specifically about kamikaze pilots, woke because it's not
| about all pilots?
| [deleted]
| deerIRL wrote:
| I find it hilarious that by just having fellow women exist it
| is somehow political... You do realize the overwhelming
| majority of computers in WWII were women right?
| westurner wrote:
| There are at least hundreds of mostly all masculine dude war
| movies. As said films are about just regular dudes in war, and
| historical, is there any appropriate gender outrage?
|
| A person can simply superimpose a whole separate identity and
| preference agenda to the storyline, which - if non-historical -
| may be all characters from one writer, whose paintings at least
| aren't at all obligated to be representative samples.
| belorn wrote:
| I recall that most war movies I seen tend to have women in
| the resistance movements, especially the french one. The only
| place where there are only men is those that were drafted
| since the military draft only forced men to go to war.
|
| For shots focusing on the factories, again women tend to be
| featured. With most young men was drafted into the military
| front, and much of the civil industry being diverted to
| produce war material, women was critical to fill in the need
| for workers. Top Secret Rosies seem to be illustrating that
| fact.
|
| One major demographic that old war movies tend to not show is
| children. When half the work group is drafted, and the other
| half is diverted to do both the civil and the war production
| (and everything else in private life), children were not just
| playing in the fairground or studying in school. It is
| however not very nice to illustrate child labor, so old and
| new war films tend to avoid that.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| cheschire wrote:
| Okay so the Rosie name is apparently a reference[0] to Rosie the
| Riveter[1].
|
| I was originally wondering if Rosie[2] from The Jetsons was named
| after these ladies as a reference, but apparently the "ie"
| spelling was a season 2 change and so probably unrelated.
|
| 0: http://www.topsecretrosies.com/
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
|
| 2: https://thejetsons.fandom.com/wiki/Rosey
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The associated documentary is "free" to stream on Kanopy. We
| enjoyed it.
| westurner wrote:
| "Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII" (2010)
| https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/122786
| https://g.co/kgs/49A9bD
| pamelafox wrote:
| I just started reading the Lady Astronaut sci-fi series last
| night, starting with "The Calculating Stars", and its main
| character is a female "computer". Really interesting perspective
| I haven't seen in sci-fi before.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| The acknowledgements at the end and bibliography/recommended
| reading list for her research was interesting, too.
| westurner wrote:
| Similar ones:
|
| "Code girls : the untold story of the American women code
| breakers of World War II" (2017) https://g.co/kgs/CBSxQv
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Girls
|
| "Hidden Figures" (2016)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
| https://g.co/kgs/m2fFvN
|
| Women in science : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science
| dralley wrote:
| Also, the British Women Royal Naval Service serving in Western
| Approaches Tactical Unit during WWII, who developed a great
| number of extremely effective tactics for fighting U-boats, as
| well as effectively reverse engineering bits and pieces of
| German technology that had never been physically seen by
| analyzing the tactics of their employment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Approaches_Tactical_Un...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVet82IUAqQ
| msoucy wrote:
| I loved Hidden Figures, but even more so I loved hearing
| stories of little girls who saw it and spent the next few days
| playing "Scientist". Showing history inspires the future.
| saboot wrote:
| I'd be interested in a reference (preferrably historical) on how
| to do these computations by hand. Was it all done by looking up
| in evaluated function tables?
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