[Ads-l] "Human computer" as retronym & Hidden Figures

[Chris Waigl]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2017 at 11:31 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

>
>
> Or just “computers”, since the other (electronic) kind hadn’t become the
> default variety yet.  A case of “marking reversal”:
>
> STAGE I:   “computers”  [= human]
> STAGE II:  “computers”  [= human] vs. “electronic computers”
> STAGE III: “computers” [= electronic] vs. “human computers”
> STAGE IV: “computers” [= electronic]
>
>
​I'll just add something from an oral history interview with Marshall
Rosenbluth of Los Alamos, about the development of an important statistical
computing algorithm (called today the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm). The
interview was in 2003, and the time he talks about is ~1952 (the paper came
out in 1953). So obviously we don't know which usage of computer was
contemporaneous. If I find the time I'll look into the audio of the passage
where he mentions the "computer [women]".  The paper itself uses "computing
machine(s)" throughout. (It's Metropolis et al., "Equation of State
Calculations by Fast Computing Machines".)

This passage is something I want to use in a talk I'll be giving in May
(not about language, but about that algorithm).

Chris


===
Barth:
Your collaborators for these papers were Edward Teller and Nick Metropolis
and your former wife?

Rosenbluth:
Yes. She actually did all the coding, which at that time was a new art for
these new machines. You know, no compilers or anything like that.

Barth:
And it’s also listing A.H. Teller.

Rosenbluth:
That was Teller’s wife, who during the war had been one of these computer
[women]— he wanted her to get back into the work, but she never showed up.
So she was basically—

Barth:
Put on the paper for it?

Rosenbluth:
Yes. As was Metropolis, I should say. Metropolis was boss of the computer
laboratory. We never had a single scientific discussion with him.

Barth:
This was then basically your work in 1955 and 1956?

Rosenbluth:
No, earlier than that. It sort of started during the period after we had
done the MIKE calculations on the SEAC, the Bureau of Standards machine,
and it seemed to me there wasn’t much more to be done on those so I was
looking to switch fields. Of course, I knew there must be something that
they could do on computers that they couldn’t do before. This was what I
hit on, or Teller hit on, I’m not sure. ​
​====

​


-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

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