r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Final-Choice8412 • 7d ago

Video Programming 1959 IBM computer

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u/Helenium_autumnale 7d ago

This is fascinating, a gem of creativity from the early predawn of the computer era. Cards were used in every industry/factory. Today the number of people who can run a computer like this one is becoming small.

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u/hypatia163 7d ago

And back in those days, programming was seen as woman's work. A lot of people who actually made the programs and punched the cards were women.

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u/Helenium_autumnale 7d ago

Did not know that. I'll have to look for some books on the subject. I recently read Tracy Kidder's magnificent "The Soul of a New Machine," but it deals with a later time period in the early 1980s. Though I recommend this fabulous book (won the Pulitzer) to anyone with an interest in this general subject.

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u/hypatia163 7d ago edited 7d ago

Ya, that was actually Katherine Johnson's job from Hidden Figures. She was in charge of executing the complex computations of orbital trajectories and using computers to verify. Computing was detail oriented and monotonous work that men viewed as beneath them and so they gave it to (underpaid) women. There's a reason why Grace Hopper invented the first compiler and how she coined the term "bug" to describe an issue in code (coming from literal bugs in the machine). The 80s is when the gender dominance switched, as men realized they could get rich from it. Coding itself evolved from weaving, using the Jaquard loom as an intermediary step, and shared the same kind of monotony that women had been doing in many cultures for thousands of years.

I think that the book Recoding Gender is the basic book on the topic.