charles babbage called what computers did mental labor. that is a pretty good way of thinking of it. computing wasn't seen as requiring a lot of intellectual talent for sophistication. it was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you did with your arms. ultimately, human computers did a lot more than hammer nails. they prepared ballistics trajectories for the u.s. army. they assisted numerical studies on the manhattan project, crunched astronomical data at harvard, crunched -- cracked nazi code. they did have one thing in common and i think it is easy to guess what that is. they were all women. that's right. commuting -- computing was so much a woman's job that by the time computing machines can long, mathematicians populated how long they took the process problems in girl years or described units of machine labor isterms of kilo girls, which pretty remarkable in which. womenhe beginning the were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. pickering needed an for stellaromputers data