On 01/14/2017 05:49 AM, Linda wrote:
> Awesome! I saw the movie yesterday. It was very good. Thanks to all who
> helped and provided the historical accuracy.
>
> I was in elementary school in Florida during that time. We were given the day
> off school to watch the launch on TV. Of course we also had to write a short
> report about it. I will never forget it.
>
> My first mainframe was a Univac 90/70D at college. I learned to program on
> it, then operations and some of the systems work.
>
> Linda Mooney
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Jan 13, 2017, at 8:38 AM, David Boyes <dbo...@sinenomine.net> wrote:
>>
>> It's interesting to note that this mailing list indirectly contributed to
>> the movie. The directors contacted several people on this list whose
>> experience goes back to the days when 7090s walked the earth, and we were
>> able to correct a number of issues about what would have been possible or
>> permitted with such a machine.
>>
>> It's really weird to see how personal computers have influenced people's
>> assumptions about what is and is not possible. NASA's 7090 was strictly
>> access-controlled, and there would have been no ability to touch the
>> hardware, certainly not by applications programmers. The directors had a
>> hard time comprehending the idea of leased machines and charging by the CPU
>> meter -- they didn't believe it until I was able to show them paperwork from
>> that era that laid out IBM's expectations of customer and FE
>> responsibilities and the charging model.
>>
>> So, pat yourselves on the back -- we kept things accurate. The movie's worth
>> seeing.
>>
>>
>>
>
The movie is good, but as typical for a movie took many liberties with
the book for dramatic effect and time compression. I would trust the
book as more historically accurate. Two such cases in point:
Katherine Johnson was given permission to attend planning meetings
previously restricted to men, but the bit about her performing at one of
those meetings the amazing feat of solving a previously unsolved problem
of producing precise landing coordinates using one blackboard of
equations, minimal arithmetic, and not even the help of a calculating
machine looks totally bogus, and I don't recall any such episode in the
book. The nature of the problems they were typically trying to solve
did not reduce to equations that could be directly or easily solved, but
required solution by a large enough sequence of iterative numerical
approximations to arrive at results of sufficient accuracy -- a very
tedious and exacting process when done by hand.
She did recheck and confirm the computer results for John Glenn's
flight trajectory at his request, but not in a few hours prior to the
launch as depicted in the movie -- her manual calculations with the aid
of a mechanical calculating machine took her not a few hours but
actually 1 1/2 days.
Her real talents were very exceptional, but the movie exaggerates some
of them for the sake of drama and entertainment.
Joel C. Ewing
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org
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