Notes for David Alan Grier When Computers Were Human
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INTRODUCTION
A
Grandmother’s Secret Life
PART I
Astronomy
and the Division of Labor 1682-1880
CHAPTER ONE
The
First Anticipated Return: Halley’s Comet 1758
CHAPTER TWO
The
Children of Adam Smith
CHAPTER THREE
The
Celestial Factory: Halley’s Comet 1835
(54) The computing staff of the British Nautical Almanac and the computers of the Royal Greenwich Observatory would provide models for computing offices for the next eighty years. Such offices would have a central computing room, an active manager, preprinted computing forms, standard methods of calculation, and a common means of checking results. They would also have regular hours of operation, a clock on the wall beating out the hours, and an oversight board that would ensure that the work was well done.
Grier, David Alan. When Computers Were Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Print.