The theorists began to organize something new in the annals of computation: a combination of the calculating machine and the factory assembly line. Even before the IBM machines arrived Feynman and Metropolis set up an array of people—mostly wives of scientists, working at three-eighths salary—who individually handled pieces of complex equations, one cubing a number and passing it on, another performing a subtraction, and so on. It was mass production married to numerical calculation. The banks of women wielding Marchants simulated the internal workings of a computer. As a later generation
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