Party Vibe

@tryptameanie 982210 wrote:

Seems it wasn’t only Nazi rocket scientists that did it, women helped as well.

Meet The Woman Whose Code Took Humans to The Moon

Although the views of the Nazi-regime were highly patriarchal (reversing a long running trend towards gender equality across Northern Europe) I was watching a training film for the WW II LN-Dienst (Luftwaffe surveillance unit) a few months ago (you won’t find this on youtube although it is published via the USA govt archives who acquired it during the 1940s and can be found as part of a military history collection on archive.org).

One thing I noticed and wasn’t expecting was how gender diverse the LN-Dienst was it appeared the female staff had been tasked with the more important work of ensuring the various intercept signals and orders to transmit jamming signals were correctly routed) and how polite everyone was to one another given this was in the middle of a war; there was even less goose-stepping and salutes than I’d expected to see!

During the 80s/early 90s it was perfectly normal for young women in Europe (and presumably elsewhere in the world) study tech subjects and careers; I am not sure why things have gone backwards in the last two decades; at least in the global West….

Although to be fair on NASA (who have tried to highlight her achievements in various press relases) I think a big reason Margaret Hamilton might not be as well known as other female computer scientists of the same era is nothing to do with discrimination but simply that she shares her name with the actress who played the witch in the Wizard of Oz, as well as an Australian publisher of childrens books.

there was also considerable infighting between die Luftwaffe, das Heer (Army) & die Marine (Navy); these services didn’t even use standardised comms procedures (which added to security risks).

Added to which Hitler encouraged competition over cooperation amongst big German corporates supplying the régime, and although lacking in any science/engineering knowledge often interfered with decisions made by the scientists and engineers.

There were also loads of “under the table” transfers of technology across UK, DE, USA and SU both before and after WW II and well into the Cold War era (which is why a lot of these scientists ended up being able to disappear to the USA and other countries).

One thing I did also initially wonder about was why the article was written in such a way it could be easy for a younger reader to mistakenly assume Margaret Hamiliton the computer scientist is no longer alive (especially if she is confused with the actress who was a good few years older). She is still around and working in tech; for her own company which deals with a lot of Pentagon “defense” projects.

Hardly an unusual career path for an ex NASA boffin but in the current climate I can see why the tech journos might not want to mention that bit too much – especially as I’ve noticed a lot of the female journalists especially on the Asian sites like fossbytes and techworm often real long term day jobs in security/compliance roles.

These lasses are the managers working in various parts of Asia and East Europe who try and stop the younger call centre staff selling your personal details to scammers or ringing you up at stupid times and threatening to set Daesh on your family if you dare to challenge them…

At least for my generation she is overshadowed to some extent by (and also confused with) Grace Hopper (1906-1992).

we were taught about her in high school computer studies to emphasise the importance of testing and debugging.

She worked for the Pentagon in 1947 when computers used valves and electromagnetic relays – and had to investigate why the computer was outputting wildly incorrect numbers compared to the expected test results. There was an actual bug in the computer (a moth caught in a relay; causing other circuits not to be switched correctly).

(link is below; it won’t embed the picture for some reason)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#/media/File:H96566k.jpg

Analogue computers use analogue electronics and signals such as 0-10 volts to represent 0-10 in some calculations. Various circuits could process this to output other useful results (at least to those who understood the hard maths involved). They were used for both civilian and military applications well into the 1970s including many industrial control systems as these worked better for monitoring and/or interacting with constantly changing signals such as flow of liquids in pipes etc – some modern digital equipment still has analogue signal inputs for interfacing with older control systems

Some 1980s computers (very specialised ones for aerospace applications) combined both analogue and digital circuitry – before that there were electromechanical computers, I think these are still classed as digital although they might use different number bases to binary.

Babbages difference engine was one of them, the Germans also built various similar devices.

Another thing I ended up reading fairly recently was a magazine published by two German chaps about my age (but far smarter) who still build demonstration versions of these and similar devices (including basic crypto systems) out of Fischertechnik (DE version of technic Lego but even more complex)…