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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