The Orchestrator

The Introduction opened with the women whose job title was computer and treated their move into the new work as a warning, not a comfort: the title goes first, and the need for judgment outlives it. What I left out was what the move cost and who arranged it. After Chapter 12’s insistence that the institution has to build the path, the history should pass the same test.

At Langley the path was thin. The women were hired as “subprofessionals” — a junior computer started at $1,440 a year in the 1940s, while men with similar degrees started as junior engineers at $2,600 — and by 1946 the laboratory had trained about four hundred of them. When the first electronic machine arrived in 1947 it got its own computing group under Sara Bullock, and programming became part of the computers’ job. What the institution did not build was a ladder. NASA’s own history says the computers “had to seek out their own opportunities for advancement.” Christine Darden, hired in 1967 already knowing how to program, went years without a promotion — five by one NASA account, eight by another — transferred herself into sonic-boom research, and became an engineer with a doctorate. Many stayed for whole careers; others moved into other work at the laboratory. Nobody counted how many did which. The record is a set of interviews, not a census.²

The one institutional act in that story came from outside it. In 1958 the NACA became NASA, segregated units were abolished, and Dorothy Vaughan and many of the West Area Computers she had supervised were placed in the new Analysis and Computation Division — an integrated group with a name, a branch, and a classification — where she became an expert FORTRAN programmer and worked until 1971.³ The path appeared when the organization created a place to stand. It had not appeared in the twelve years before, when the same women were doing the same work.

At JPL the path was a person. Macie Roberts, and after her Helen Ling, ran the computing group and hired only women. Ling pushed the women in her group to attend night school for the degrees that qualified them for professional positions, and enough of them became computer scientists and engineers that the group called itself “Helen’s girls.”⁴ The laboratory had no maternity leave; a woman who had a child left, and Ling’s answer was to call the women who had left and hire them back. When the IBM machines arrived, engineers who did not yet trust them handed the programming to the computers as clerical work, and the computers took the training and learned FORTRAN.⁵

I recognize that arrangement. It is my Saturdays. A path held open by one person’s phone calls, outside policy, closes when the person retires; that it held at JPL for thirty years is a tribute to Ling, not to the institution. The computers who moved into the new work did so because the machine arrived in their building and was handed to them, because someone made the training reachable, and because someone kept them employed through the events that would otherwise have ended their careers. Each of those is an institutional act, whoever performs it. An organization whose plan for its junior engineers is that they will pick up orchestration on their own has Langley’s subprofessional grade without Langley’s Sara Bullock, and should not expect Langley’s outcome.

What that history predicts for programmers is narrower than either side of the current argument wants. David Alan Grier’s history of the occupation runs from Halley’s comet in 1758 to a UNIVAC in 1986 and ends, in his publisher’s summary, with a machine “that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.”⁶ The Harvard Observatory’s computers, whose work was dismissed as clerical, produced the stellar classification astronomers still use; JPL’s learned FORTRAN, and the personal computer eventually displaced them. So the record says three things and refuses a fourth. The routine work moves to the machine first, and the title moves with it. The people who understand the system behind the numbers keep working, under new titles, for as long as the institution gives them somewhere to stand. And the occupation does end — over decades, not on a schedule — when the tools stop needing the people who learned them. What the record will not give you is a date, a percentage, or any assurance about where a particular programmer lands.