When Computers Were Human

"This book is about the period in which Turing worked, the 1930s. It’s important and often ignored that the world of electronic and mechanical computing didn’t come out of thin air. It came out of a world in which we were doing a large amount of computation, but with people. In America, during the Great Depression, we had something called the Works Progress Administration. One of the things they did to create jobs was to set up vast engines of human computation to make mathematical tables and suchlike. Much of what later became electronic was first done by these people – before it was mechanised one step at a time. David Alan Grier’s grandmother was one of these human computers, so he had a very strong interest in digging up their stories. It’s a marvellous book, rich in the detail of what those times were like. Yes, they were called computers. Grier himself is an electronic engineer, chairman of the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers], and he delved into how today’s algorithms came from what was worked out by human beings. It’s a very rich subject. Exactly the same process was going on in England and elsewhere, with accounting laboratories and scientific computing centres where problems were fed to large groups of people. In computation, we are moving numbers around. Whether you move them between people with pencil and paper, or on silicon chips between gates at the speed of light, it’s the same process."