Back to Bletchley Park – the dawn of the computing industry in Britain, and women really were right there in the mix – as I said earlier 80% of the workforce at Bletchley Park was women. But the problem is history seems to focus on the ability of the machines themselves, making them seem far more automatic than what they actually were. So lets be clear – these women were not just machine operators running, or tending to the machines.
These women were soldering the machines together, maintaining, fixing and programming them around the clock – often working 24 hour shifts in extremely high pressure circumstances.