Women programmers in WWII

[Temporal]

Women have been programming computers for a long time. A number of them started as people who did ballistics computations in WWII. Then some men built a machine to do computations, but someone had to teach it how to do it - and that was the women who were already doing the computations. They programmed the machine for the military, they debugged it, and they made it to do complex math faster than could be done by hand.

Then they showed the brass how it worked.

But none of the women programmers was invited to the celebratory dinner that followed. Later, they heard they were thought of as... models, placed there to show off the machine.

Read about these interesting women here:
Rediscovering WWII's female 'computers' - CNN.com

It's interesting how quickly this information gets lost. We hear about Ada Lovelace (the first programmer ever) but then we never hear that the first programmers of a modern computer were women. I hope there are teachers who can use the documentary and the teachers' guides in their curriculum!