Rediscovering WWII's female "computers". While researching a documentary in Philadelphia, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson came across two women with a story she'd never heard before: thousands of women with advanced mathematical skills employed as "computers", working day and night during WWII to supply soldiers in the field with precise ballistics algorithms. Some of those women also went on to program
ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer (
previously). Erickson turned their stories into
Top Secret Rosies, a documentary released to theaters last year and to DVD this month. One of those programmers, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik,
spoke at length to the Computing History Museum in 2008. [youtube, 1:07:19] [
via]
posted by Errant
on Feb 8, 2011 -
32 comments
DailyWTF is a "Programming Bloopers" repository and forum, collecting, dissecting and making good fun of badly written code. Programmers can appreciate their fellow coders'
strange or
plainly funny problem solving techniques. Sometimes programmers will
square the wheel while reinventing it. Or take the
best practices to the insanity level.
Some programming knowledge required.
posted by nkyad
on Apr 27, 2005 -
21 comments
Disgruntled spouse 'outs' Electronic Arts' harsh employment practices, and by implication disses the whole American 'work 'em 'till they drop' ethos. Is this the start of a quiet revolution or is the American Way too entrenched to be stopped?
posted by Duug
on Nov 11, 2004 -
65 comments
The Dark Side of Google? Google's
first annual programming contest was a shrewd way to encourage Java and Python programmers. But this may be shrewder than the programmers who entered the contest realized.
David Egnor may have nabbed a cool $10,000 as the contest winner, but for all the other entries, Google nabbed "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive" rights.
posted by ed
on May 31, 2002 -
14 comments
"It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential."
But now the techies in Silicon Valley who prospered with that
dash are having children with far more pronounced problems. Is having too many shy programmers in one spot the equivalent to pissing in the gene pool?
posted by hellinskira
on Dec 19, 2001 -
31 comments
Software projects are notorious for time and budget overruns (examples that come to mind include
Mozilla and the
Denver Airport baggage system). There are a large number of design methods, development processes, and programming methodologies that claim or hint at objective estimation of development schedules, project complexity, and programmer productivity. Unfortunately,
they're all bunk.
"The creation of genuinely new software has far more in common with developing a new theory of physics than it does with producing cars or watches on an assembly line."
Programmers, try telling that one to your next customer.
posted by lagado
on Nov 21, 2001 -
21 comments
The giant list of classic computer programmers takes you back to a time when one person could realistically author a computer game and have it published. Of course most of the people on this list will have worked on small teams to produce games, but the diversity of the games on these people's resumes is awesome. In particular, I notice Michael Cranford (responsible for The Bard's Tale I and II, the Centauri Alliance, and ports of Donkey Kong and Super Zaxxon) and Robert Woodhead (Wizardry 1-5). As an interesting sidenote, Robert Woodhead went on to
Animeigo, a japanese animation publishing company in the US. What memories of these old sk00l games do you have?
posted by moz
on Jul 6, 2001 -
34 comments
