One such computer was Dorothy Vaughan who began her work in 1943 with the Langley Research Center as a special hire to aid the war effort, and who came to supervise the West Area Computers, a group of African-American women who worked as computers at Langley. Human computing was, at the time, considered menial work. On November 8, 2019, the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded "In recognition of all the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) between the 1930s and the 1970s." As electrical computers became more available, human computers, especially women, were drafted as some of the first computer programmers. Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women, namely: Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas. Human-assisted computation The term "human computer" has been recently used by a group of researchers who refer to their work as "human computation". In this usage, "human computer" refers to activities of humans in the context of human-based computation (HBC). This use of "human computer" is debatable for the following reason: HBC is a computational technique where a machine outsources certain parts of a task to humans to perform, which are not necessarily algorithmic. In fact, in the context of HBC most of the time humans are not provided with a sequence of exact steps to be executed to yield the desired result; HBC is agnostic about how humans solve the problem. This is why "outsourcing" is the term used in the definition above. The use of humans in the historical role of "human computers" for HBC is very rare. See also Difference enginean early automatic mechanical calculator designed to replace human computers Mathematical Tables Projecta project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed human computers Mentata fictional human computer Women in computing Notes References Grier, David Alan (May 11, 2001). The Human Computer and the Birth of the Information Age, Joseph Henry Lecture, Philosophical Society of Washington. Excerpt. External links Early NACA human computers at work, photograph, October 1949. The Age of Female Computers, by David Skinner Sonoma State University Wellesley