Technology & Computing
The West Area computers become programmers
The problem
Electronic computers were about to make human computation obsolete — and the humans in question were Black women working in a segregated unit with no obvious route into the new work.
The innovation
Dorothy Vaughan taught herself FORTRAN and machine operation, then taught her staff, converting a pool of hand calculators into the programming staff of the new Analysis and Computation Division.
How it worked
She acquired manuals, trained the unit in her own time, and positioned her people as the ones who already understood the aeronautical problems the machines were being bought to solve.
Why it mattered
Careers that segregation and automation would otherwise have ended instead moved into computing at the centre of American spaceflight.
The legacy
One of the clearest documented cases of an institution's technical transition being navigated by the workers it was expected to displace.
Sources
West Area Computing unit and Analysis and Computation Division records
Primary recordHidden Figures
Scholarship
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