All of the reviews, or at least most of the reviews, quoted this one paragraph, which I have called my “Dickensian Rant”.  The people who did computation by hand were generally intelligent ambitious people who lacked the social or monetary capital to go to college and pursue a technical or managerial career. Many people have claimed that they were exclusively women but they were drawn from a much larger part of society.

An audio version of the commentary on human computers is below.