What is a COMPUTER? | Hidden Figures
Most people today would describe a "computer" as some sort of machine, but in fact it used to mean something else.
Machines that could complete calculation or task by follow commands, and then deciding what to do next, we're becoming more powerful as human ambitious grew in the mid 20th century. But these machines would replace another entity capable of completing calculations - Humans!
Meet DOROTHY VAUGHAN who helped make the transition from computer to programmer. She was the first Black Female Supervisor at NASA, by programming the mainframe machine - the IBM 7090.
Our technology has progressed since the 1960s, but these machines and languages have led the way for our modern generation of digital storage and communication devices.
[0:00] Introduction
[0:39] Computers are Humans
[4:17] The IBM
[7:41] Fortran
check out the full movie here
• Hidden Figures
Actually, one of the best "maths" movies there is. Not for the actual accuracy, but for the importance of the brain and how it lives in all of us. Great video.
As a former engineer, I found that successful engineers thought as the characters in the movie. They looked at the future, they pushed their education, and the were innovative. These ladies are my hero.
My mother worked for the military in the 70s, working with IBM computers, she was a master at Cobol and Fortran and taught me about thinking in binary.
I got COBOL to do things back in the 70s that IBM said could never be done. I never took no for an answer. My first real computer was a 1401, then 360, 370, 4300, 3090. My main language was always Assembler, but came in 1st place in a COBOL coding contest in NY state. I am well versed in 13 languages now. I pick the right language for a particular situation
I remember Fortran from college. In addition to code, You still had to understand mathematics in order to write the formulas for the IBM machine. Because garbage IN, garbage Out.
Just imagine being that woman, and looking down and seeing "Supervisor" as your new job title. In that era, in that field, and she's the Supervisor of an at the time state of the art machine for Nasa. The pride and sense of accomplishment must have been overwhelming. Bringing up her team and getting them to come with her as well is the kind of thing that really speaks to her character. Especially with all of the prejudice and discrimination going on, it couldn't have been easy.
I personally loved this movie, yes there was discrimination but it actually portrayed black women in a different light. They were Smart and accomplished and willing to go toe to toe for their jobs because of it. Not the stereotypes of blacks.
I love the fact it was based on true story, the depiction of these amazing women was all fact. Hollywood’s portrayal of ethnic women over the years and especially in the past, was purely fictional and sadly very degrading. My grandma spoke three languages and a black lady, but they depicted women of colour like they were illiterate and that’s just not right. I’m 60 now, things for a lady of colour was very challenging, sometimes it didn’t matter if they had finances, doors was still closed and restrictions in place left right & centre. We have come a long way, but bigotry is still prevalent in some places and it’s only thriving through ignorance as it’s past down through the generations. Education is the way forward and I encourage all my children to strive for their best no matter what.
The stereotypes of black???? what are they?
@@ROSEMOORE35 we can start with the obvious: lazy. What are you thoughts about the comment rather than a question.
@@calibrexdaoc you mean like how white men are all cheaters, and bullies with a crack addiction, and white women are all intollerable karens who's going to call the police because someone different than them walked down the sidewalk? They did comment on the post. Asking a question for clarification on something literally in the post, is a commentary. And it spoke volumes
@@lasrber fact: women cheat more than women; fact: the black culture has more ‘bullies’ (as you put it) than white culture; fact: crack affects more black culture individuals than white; you are quoting a few white women examples out of millions of non-Karen’s so that’s a bad example. Got anything more?
I took computer programming in high school 1981-83. We learned Basic, Fortran, and COBOL. We sat at terminals and wrote programs for the school district computer, which filled an entire room downtown at school district headquarters. All the terminals in every school office and classroom were connected by phone lines to the district’s one computer. My sophomore year of college, the university replaced the terminals in the computer lab with personal computers running MS-DOS. I had never known that the IBM in Hidden Figures was programmed with Fortran.
Octavia Spencer was a supporting actress in a movie called Gifted, I highly recommend it .
In the 1700 and 1800's men and women calculated trig tables to be used by ships navigators to locarte their position at sea. The British called them 'computers'. The first mechanical computer was built by a British inventor Charles Babbage tto do what the 'computers' did.
Nope Charles Babbage wasn`t the first inventor/builder of the first mechanical computer, this honour goes to the old greeks with their "Antikythera mechanism".
@@bikercowboy1 Babbage also never built his design
This post is very valuable. It humanized and explained the various barriers that blacks have and unfortunately, in too many cases, must still overcome. The notion that we aren't equally intelligent as any other grouping of humans is constantly challenged and likewise, constantly proven void of merit for those narrow minded enough to believe there is a gap in capabilities.
Well said Mr Starks. I saw a video some weeks ago on YT where such a "norrow minded" (in)human tried to persuade everyone that Caucasians and Asians have a far more higher "IQ" than Africans, it was despicable to see and hear. I am "white" but i don`t see that the colour of (y)our skin says anything about (y)our "IQ" or (y)our wisdom or (y)our knowledge or (y)our craft. The only thing I see is wether you are educated or not and if you are going on with your education all your live along and that´s the only difference in all of our lifes. Now I want to see this movie and get also more to know about this extraordinary Lady and her companions at NASA. I also hope that we all start to accept/honour each other by our dignity and honesty/fair-mindedness and knowledge and righteousness and not by the colour of our skins.
I recently got a digital piano to learn to play it, one of my in-laws said "That's not a real piano" my reply was "That's not a real computer" pointing at his laptop. 🤣 Already have my next counter-argument, if he tells me to use an acoustic piano, will tell him to use an abacus instead. 😁
I learned Fortran & Cobol in college in the late 70's
Fortran was the first programming language I was taught (I had learnt some BASIC from using a Spectrum and from books of pre written game code) in 1991. Remember six spaces at the start of every line.
Ms. Vaughn is a much smarter person than I, Fortran ended my pursuit of an Engineering degree.
Love this movie
I think that I should take issue about 'computers' working only or largely for NASA... computers are what once made insurance companies go. And they also often worked in math departments of High Schools and Universities as teachers and Professors. There's this story that I once heard about undergraduates working for Universities in checking whether the standardized tables for reference books were correct or not. That is how many worked their way through Grad School, back in the day, as the publishers of these reference book would hire the Universities with their teams of computers and then hire another batch of Universities to compare the answers of the first set of Universities. There are sometimes reruns of movies made during the 40s and 50s and sometimes 60s that follow fictional lives of individuals that were perceived as "smart" as they could or would, in the movies, get to the end point without having to hire several layers of Universities. If I recall correctly, the movie, 'The Bridge Over the River Kwai,' is one such movie in which there is a flashback by one of the characters into his former life where he was one such 'computer' that worked during the 1930s for an insurance company stationed in the Country of Canada. I think that in that movie, the fellow ran an adding machine. And the consequences of human computers are still with us as some are seen as smart as they too, as in olden days, get to an end without having to hire layers and layers of Universities. But with laptops and the Internet, and spreadsheet programs, much of what has gone before is largely moot. Of course, it still helps if you know enough to plug and crank with a laptop/spreadsheet and then be able to understand just what came out. Hmm, might there still be social upset and unrest, even with nearly unlimited computing power available to almost anyone.... down at their local public library? What? Not funny enough for you, or maybe not profound enough? Depending on your point of view.
2 barriers were broken, racial and gender. In part it went back to the calculators used for the WWII planes (aerodynamics) and the shortages of men (mainly white men).
A hugely underrated and under seen film....
From more than one perspective. For instance, I learned from this, my boss is a calculator and is extinct :P Wonderfully crafted movie, and as someone once said, change or be changed
As an accounting student in the early 70's I learned Basic, COBOL and Fortran. I was close to a min or in Data Processing. I wish I had pursued that instead of accounting, more exciting.
I had much of the same. From high school to business school for accounting and COBOL programming. I taugh myself BASIC and programming the Commodore 64. Luckily accounting took me programming spreadsheets with the early Smart System and Lotus 123.
my dad work with computers from the 50s till his death at the turn of the century. his first boss was a computer. when i tell people that they are very confused. i always find it funny the way people have no idea what a computer was before we had computers. :)
Thank you, Dorothy.
Just a really great and compelling film.
I remember being taught to use punch cards to program a computer in binary language while I was a Senior in high school. That was 1980-1981. Computers still took up a whole room and need to be kept cool so they had special rooms that had AC. So we had to remotely use the hoard of education computers to do our programming lessons.
Explain to me how you programmed in binary language on punch cards. You wrote in a SOURCE language and it compiled to OBJECT code, then you did a LINKEDT to combined library routine to get to an Executable. No one programmes in BINARY
@@rty1955 Son that was over 40 years ago in high school. I haven’t message with computer language in more than 35 yrs. Get that stick outta your butt and look it up yourself
This was a great movie.
Hard to believe that when I started high school in 69 we had a "computer room" which contained ONE IBM computer, 6 punch card machines, One card reader and One ball printer. Still running Fortran IV although we had head of the new programming language named Cobol the following year it had not yet reached the high school.
When I graduated in 1982 and took classes in COBOL and we had a Computer Lab with 30 Punch Card units and left our programs to be run over night.
I graduated in 2000 and still had classes in COBOL, which were actually still popular because there was a dearth of programmers to tackle the Y2K bug in finance, banking and insurance industries.
We had an IBM 1160 ?MINI. BIG AS HELL. (1970)
@@johnturtlebury1077 You probably meant 1130. Mini is on the mark when compared to the 'mainframe' 360 and soon 370 machines for bigger shops.
Fancy high school.
12:25 "...set the stage for other mainframe computers like the cloud..." The cloud is not a computer. It is a network of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center.
My Mother-in-law was a Human Computer for NASA like the women in Hidden Figures. She was at Edwards Air Force Base in California checking and doing the Mathematics for NACA the genesis of NASA.
I did not know that computer was a job.
Such a good movie
I'm pretty sure the IBM 7090 was a real-time prossesor with flashing lights. A batch processor IBM, like a 1400 or 360, was what the commercial industry used and was what my dad started his programming career on in 1969. If you look at the actual NASA computer pictures, there are no tape machines or punch card machines, as shown in the movie. Those were present on much later machines that I remember walking through as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s when my dad would take me in for a weekend tape change.
I learned ForTran in 1988 on a VAX
Love it i use to sell ibm pc and cloness for a company called PC Craft
I remember the early IBM card punch computers in the early 1960s at Michigan State University.
Didn't know that African-American women were actually responsible for our success in the space race. Learned something new today. Have a good day.
We can't do it without women.
Spot on. There was a hilarious example of stupid attitude in the paper just last weekend. For International Women's Day the All Blacks posted “Forever grateful to all the women in our lives that allow us to play the game we love. … [it just gets more embarrassing]” The context: The Black Ferns are reigning world champions and have won five of the last six Women's World Cups, while the country's sevens team, the Black Ferns Sevens, have won the last two world cups and are the current Olympic and Commonwealth champions.
Dorothy Vaughn was a trailblazer. If she didn't have foresight to learn Fortran codes. A lot of those ladies would been instantly out of work.😏😀
bad ass man 4 real
The title, Hidden figures, refers to the unrecognized black women who had a huge role in NASA and their operations not the "Hidden calculations".
Why is it that when I look at KZhead videos for Star Trek Online, it's like the various people who uploaded those videos
OOH OOH YEAH MY PARENTS AND KANE@MY WIFEY KEKE REMEMBER THIS MOVIE ACTION AND GOOD
It's also a film about the rampant racism in dumb-erica. Oh, and sexism.....
cal-q-lations. For hells sake. Do your homework.
? What do you mean?
@@christybradfield7812 He’s referring to the narrator’s poor pronunciation of the word calculating.
@@jackmandu Thank you!
computers, so what in a name? I never thought that they call people human computers at one time, it look like they was really teaching americans real math at one time, the education system fell off for alot of people... human computers they was doing that long math
RecyK0nul4xeon!
This is quite a refreshing change from What is a woman? 😂
Only in a movie.
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Should have stayed hidden
Because truth hurts you, uh?