They Really CAN Replace You.

In the early days, NASA contracted with JPL Federal Science

It took great teams to produce the necessary numbers.  Even in my area of science we once utilized people and checked their work, and until their work was thouroughly checked and rechecked, we kept the papers around to show the logical mathematical trail.

Much of this computation was done by hand using #3H and #4H hardness pencils and there are probably kids on Xomba here that do not understand what use a  #9H[hardness] pencil had.  Drafting and drawing very fine lines on hard paper, or writing on sand paper like books making recordations in the rainy period in coastal Washington/Oregon or in Hawaii.

Most of these women had the hand crank calculators, the old Marchants, and Freidens, and used the pencil to accumulate the intermidiate results and then record the final results.

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA JPL text---"During the 1940s and 1950s, JPL used the word "computer" to refer to a person rather than a machine. The all-female computer team, many of the members recruited right out of high school, were responsible for doing all the math by hand required to plot satellite trajectories and more. "---End JPL text.
JPL photo number P-163

Going back a little further in 1936 the "rocket boys" at JPL are seen here at a rocket engine test stand at JPL, and it reminds me of my own rocket test stands from when I was a kid.  I'm ot nearly as old as the folks in the picture below, but I know exactly what they are doing in getting ready to test that engine.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jplhistory/captions/p1-RocketBoys-600.jpg

Seated left to right: Rudolph Schott, Apollo Milton Olin Smith, Frank Malina (white shirt, dark pants), Ed Forman and Jack Parsons (right, foreground). Nov. 15, 1936.

I want to clarify that I did not do the sophisticated kind of work depicted here.  I had a crew of 1 to 2 other kids helping, some times 3 or 4 other kids.  We worked in solid fuel, these fellows are using liquid fuel -- and were doing so on a "static test stand."  They were doing this 10 years after Robert Goddard's first liquid rocket fuel flight, in 1926.

I was doing rockets in the late 50's as a school kid.  I had built a static test stand and was marshalling the funds to buy enough chemistry to do a complete fuel study on the solid propellant I was mixing and making as a child.  There was no way I could afford to get the amounts of constituents to make what I figured would be the  total of 100 lbs of components to prove the fuel proportions scientifically -- my figures indicating it would take right at $100.  I decided instead, to buy a kit, and build a home made telescope.  I did.  I still have the old scope, in pieces -- used for other scopes along the line from then to now.  I did not do rocket science as I got older.  I could have.  It just did not work-out that way.

But if you were a computer now, they could replace you.