Add another casualty to the march of technology--when humans were computers (tip to Instapundit):
In his history When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier (this Grier, not that Grier) tells the story of those early computers—and of women, in particular, who used painstaking calculations on paper and, later punch card to make new scientific and literary discoveries. ...
By the 1960s, as computer technology developed, the women who took the name of "computer" were eventually replaced by machines of a more mechanical variety. The final wide-scale effort at human computing was the Mathematical Tables Project, a New Deal initiative that sought to produce tables that could be used "not only by mathematicians and astronomers, but also by surveyors, engineers, chemists, physicists, biometricians, statisticians, etc."
Pity that whole thing was halted in its tracks before we got to Giga-Girl territory. Sigh.
ATMs and copy machines have killed off lots of jobs, I know. I never heard of this one. Fascinating.
