計算者 - 翻譯

http://www.nevilshute.org/Newsletters/nl2005/nl050801.php
其中的 WHEN SHUTE WAS A HUMAN COMPUTER

Readers recalling that Nevil Shute headed a team of human computers on R100,
will be interested that Jack Calaway has written to alert us to a book called
When Computers Were Human. Here are some excerpts from an interesting, longer
review at books.slashdot.org which explains a lot:

When Computers Were Human
By David Alan Grier

In the not-so-distant past, engineers scientists and mathematicians
routinely consulted tables of numbers for the answers to questions
that they could not solve analytically. Sin(0.4)? No problem: look
it up in the Sine table. These tables were prepared by teams of people
called computers (no, really -- that's where the term comes from) who
typically had only rudimentary math skills.

The computers were overseen by more knowledgeable mathematicians, who
designed the algorithms and supervised their work.

Much of this calculation was performed under the Work Projects Administration
in the United States during the Great Depression. WPA rules required the
hiring of people with virtually no skills, so much of the definitive work of
the Mathematical Tables Project was computed by people who had mastered only
addition. They were not authorized to subtract, Perhaps the most memorable
fact from the early years of human computing is that the very first team of
French computers, assembled by Gaspard Clair Francois Marie Riche de Prony in
the early 1790s, was composed entirely of wig-makers left unemployed by the
French Revolution. They created trigonometric tables required by France's
experiments with the decimalization of trigonometry (an abandoned effort to
do for angle measure what the metric system was doing for the measurement of
mass, length, and so forth).

Women emerged as the most important computers. Demand for computing spiked in
wartime, when young men were off fighting and therefore unavailable, and the
economics of hiring women was compelling even in peacetime. They would work
for half of what similarly skilled men would.

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