TITLE: Hidden Figures, Douglas Engelbart Edition
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 18, 2017 11:42 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
 At one point in
<A HREF="http://stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/engelbart/main1-ntb.html">
   this SOHP interview</A>,
 Douglas Engelbart describes his work at the Ames Research Center
 after graduating from college.  He was an electrical engineer,
 building and maintaining wind tunnels, paging systems, and other
 special electronics.  Looking to make a connection between this
 job and his future work, the interviewer asked, "Did they have
 big computers running the various operations?"  Engelbart said:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 I'll tell you what a computer was in those days.  It was an
 underpaid woman sitting there with a hand calculator, and
 they'd have rooms full of them, that's how they got their
 computing done.  So you'd say, "What's your job?"  "I'm a
 computer."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Later in the interview, Engelbart talks about how his experience
 working with radar in the Navy contributed to his idea for a
 symbol-manipulating system that could help people deal with
 complexity and urgency.  He viewed the numeric calculations done
 by the human computers at Ames as being something different.
 Still, I wonder how much this model of parallel computing
 contributed to his ideas, if only implcitly.
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