EDSAC99 - the 50th Anniversary of EDSAC
Dec. 4th, 2019 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vla22While not directly relevant to the history of the "Cavendish Computors", the web pages of the Department for Computer Science and Technology (formerly the Computer Lab, formerly formerly the Mathematical Laboraty) celebrating the EDSAC, EDSAC II and TITAN computers do have some useful information for those of us seeking the contribution women made in the early years of (scientific) computing.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/
There are few things we can learn from scanning the material. Firstly, there have always been women at the Lab, as users, students, and staff. Not always a lot of them, but they're there. Secondly, they're not much remembered by the men - if pressed, people tend to recall the men who went on to make great names (Wheeler, Swinnerton-Dyer, Dijkstra and so on). The women are remembered by some men, though - usually those who went on to marry them! This imbalance is also apparent in the list of speakers for the day - in a list of over 13 speakers, only one is a woman (Karen Spärck-Jones - who subsequently became a professor). And in the pages listing people's recollection of the early days of computing in the University, the majority are male.
However, the male domination of computing that was very commonplace when I was first an undergraduate in the late 1990s (2-3% of students doing Computer Science were female) wasn't necessarily true in the early days. The photo of the Mathematical Laboratory people from May 1949 has three rows of people in it: one whole row is women, and there are two other women on the front row. (H. Smith, C. Mumford, H. Pye, A. Thomas, E. McKee (Eileen Breakwell), J. Steel, R. Bonham-Carter, B. Worsley).
Other women who were involved were Dr Liz Waldram, Liz Swann (later Howe), Ruth Feinstein (later Loshak) - who did some of the programming of EDSAC II for the first practical exhibition of the aperture synthesis technique in Radio Astronomy (First Results of Radio Star Observations Using the Method of Aperture Synthesis, P. F. Scott, M. Ryle, A. Hewish, MNRAS 1961, vol 122, 95S), Judy Bowers (later Thomas), Janet Richards (later Linington), Marya Goldman, Joyce Blackler (later Wheeler), Rachel Brittorn (later Wroth), Annette Haworth, Jenifer Haselgrove (later Leech), Diana Catton (later Belcham). Judy Bailey was I think dead by this time, but she was certainly an early user.
There are almost certainly more women who did the Diploma that the Lab offered, and did PhDs with the group, if the Lab is anything like the Cavendish (Jenifer Haselgrove and Diana Catton were diploma and research students, respectively). Obviously, some of these people supported staff in other departments. That was Janet Richards' job. Judy Thomas and Eileen McKee were operators, and they may have worked with other departments. Judy Bailey, Liz Waldram and Ruth Feinstein all did work for the Cavendish Radio Astronomy group, as noted in the acknowledgements to papers and theses.
There are other hints of the contributions women made to the early days of Cambridge computing. (All quotations are from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/reminiscences, accessed 04/12/2019)
Robin Stokes noted: "We were shown the assembly line, with girls soldering military surplus acorn valves into arrays of logic gates."
This refers to the early construction of EDSAC.
Peter Felgett: "An abiding memory is of a woman emerging from her office and declaring to the assembled multitude: ' I want a man, with long strong arms.' It emerged that she had lost a program tape down the back of a heavy desk."
From the fact that she had an office on site, I deduce she was probably a member of staff.
Ruth Loshak noted:; " in those days you were expected to stop working when you had a baby".
She was working in the late 50s/early 60s; a few years later, Dr Liz Waldram noted to me in conversation that she was able to work part-time around having her children, in part because there were so few qualified people who could write programs. That may have been a cultural difference between the Mathematical Laboratory (which could presumably put its (ex-)research students to the programming tasks), and the Cavendish Laboratory, which probably preferred its students to spend more time on physics experiments (or building telescopes) and less time programming.
A little later, Judy Thomas observed of TITAN: " It was run 24 hours a day by teams of operators (many more of us now and nearly all called Sue), and a permanent night shift."
This suggests to me that there were plenty of women working in the Lab from the early days after the Second World War until at least the early 1970s; however, we don't know about most of them. Some of that may be that they were employed at "routine" work, and didn't get a chance to shine. Some of them were pushed out of the workforce or sidelined when they had children. I'm sure some of them worked either in Cambridge or elsewhere, and found that the men were promoted above them, or got the better opportunities.
But they were always there.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/
There are few things we can learn from scanning the material. Firstly, there have always been women at the Lab, as users, students, and staff. Not always a lot of them, but they're there. Secondly, they're not much remembered by the men - if pressed, people tend to recall the men who went on to make great names (Wheeler, Swinnerton-Dyer, Dijkstra and so on). The women are remembered by some men, though - usually those who went on to marry them! This imbalance is also apparent in the list of speakers for the day - in a list of over 13 speakers, only one is a woman (Karen Spärck-Jones - who subsequently became a professor). And in the pages listing people's recollection of the early days of computing in the University, the majority are male.
However, the male domination of computing that was very commonplace when I was first an undergraduate in the late 1990s (2-3% of students doing Computer Science were female) wasn't necessarily true in the early days. The photo of the Mathematical Laboratory people from May 1949 has three rows of people in it: one whole row is women, and there are two other women on the front row. (H. Smith, C. Mumford, H. Pye, A. Thomas, E. McKee (Eileen Breakwell), J. Steel, R. Bonham-Carter, B. Worsley).
Other women who were involved were Dr Liz Waldram, Liz Swann (later Howe), Ruth Feinstein (later Loshak) - who did some of the programming of EDSAC II for the first practical exhibition of the aperture synthesis technique in Radio Astronomy (First Results of Radio Star Observations Using the Method of Aperture Synthesis, P. F. Scott, M. Ryle, A. Hewish, MNRAS 1961, vol 122, 95S), Judy Bowers (later Thomas), Janet Richards (later Linington), Marya Goldman, Joyce Blackler (later Wheeler), Rachel Brittorn (later Wroth), Annette Haworth, Jenifer Haselgrove (later Leech), Diana Catton (later Belcham). Judy Bailey was I think dead by this time, but she was certainly an early user.
There are almost certainly more women who did the Diploma that the Lab offered, and did PhDs with the group, if the Lab is anything like the Cavendish (Jenifer Haselgrove and Diana Catton were diploma and research students, respectively). Obviously, some of these people supported staff in other departments. That was Janet Richards' job. Judy Thomas and Eileen McKee were operators, and they may have worked with other departments. Judy Bailey, Liz Waldram and Ruth Feinstein all did work for the Cavendish Radio Astronomy group, as noted in the acknowledgements to papers and theses.
There are other hints of the contributions women made to the early days of Cambridge computing. (All quotations are from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/EDSAC99/reminiscences, accessed 04/12/2019)
Robin Stokes noted: "We were shown the assembly line, with girls soldering military surplus acorn valves into arrays of logic gates."
This refers to the early construction of EDSAC.
Peter Felgett: "An abiding memory is of a woman emerging from her office and declaring to the assembled multitude: ' I want a man, with long strong arms.' It emerged that she had lost a program tape down the back of a heavy desk."
From the fact that she had an office on site, I deduce she was probably a member of staff.
Ruth Loshak noted:; " in those days you were expected to stop working when you had a baby".
She was working in the late 50s/early 60s; a few years later, Dr Liz Waldram noted to me in conversation that she was able to work part-time around having her children, in part because there were so few qualified people who could write programs. That may have been a cultural difference between the Mathematical Laboratory (which could presumably put its (ex-)research students to the programming tasks), and the Cavendish Laboratory, which probably preferred its students to spend more time on physics experiments (or building telescopes) and less time programming.
A little later, Judy Thomas observed of TITAN: " It was run 24 hours a day by teams of operators (many more of us now and nearly all called Sue), and a permanent night shift."
This suggests to me that there were plenty of women working in the Lab from the early days after the Second World War until at least the early 1970s; however, we don't know about most of them. Some of that may be that they were employed at "routine" work, and didn't get a chance to shine. Some of them were pushed out of the workforce or sidelined when they had children. I'm sure some of them worked either in Cambridge or elsewhere, and found that the men were promoted above them, or got the better opportunities.
But they were always there.
