Movie Response: The Hidden Figures

I liked computer programming since the first day I was introduced to it at college. Ever since I have been working on different projects which involves making the computer do most of the jobs which humans find annoying.

This way I find the human-computer relationship very interesting to analyze. But have computers always been a box of electronics where a human can comfortably give commands while sitting on a while chair or even miles away from it?  The movie, The Hidden Figures, give some explanations about this.

By watching the movie, hidden figures, I learned not only about the about the history of NASA but also about the history of computers and how it affected people’s daily life. The movie tells these amazing stories by narrating lives of  Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson,  3 African American ladies who were mathematicians, computers, and gave a tremendous contribution in sending the first American to space. By watching this movie I learn how different today’s computers are from the ones which were used in the 1960s. The computers at that time were an actual human, specifically women, who manually analyzed data and sometimes punching cards to be feed into huge mechanical devices. The mechanical devices are what has evolved into today’s computers which are made of a box of electronics.

The Hidden Figures movie official trailer

Apart from topics like NASA and computers, the film also discusses sensitive topics like racism, the cold war and gender unbalance. Throughout the movie, the African Americans are segregated in term of working spaces and utilities like washrooms. Also, women like Miss Johnson and Miss Jackson are the ones who are doing the job while men like Harrison seems not doing any productive work at the office.

Will the three women job of being human computers be significant today? Totally yes! Even though most of the computer tasks nowadays are automated, but the automation itself needs mathematicians and geniuses like Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson to make the algorithm of the machine to operate and act ‘smart’.