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Nature 434, 1070-1071 (28 April 2005) | doi:10.1038/4341070a; Published online 27 April 2005
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Recovered history
Jon Agar1
BOOK REVIEWED-When Computers Were Human
by David Alan Grier
Princeton University Press: 2005. 412 pp. $35, £22.95
We work from morn till night,
For computing is our duty;
We're faithful and polite,
And our record book's a beauty;
With Crelle and Gauss, Chauvenet and Peirce,
We labor hard all day;
We add, subtract, multiply and divide,
And we never have time to play.
(from The Observatory Pinafore by Winslow Upton, 1879)Human computers certainly did work hard all day, and had the aches and pains to show for it: elbow joints inflamed from cranking calculator handles, or fingers and thumbs cramped from pencilling figure after figure on to graph paper.
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