[Albion Wilde]

Computers existed!
https://astronomy.com/news/2019/05/apollo-computers-when-ibm-engineers-gave-rockets-a-brain

Your article is great, but it is about the Apollo missions starting in the late 1960s, which was several years after the mission depicted in Hidden Figures—the U.S.'s first manned orbital flight in 1962 with John Glenn. It llasted only 5 hours, but had required years of NASA development starting in the 1950s. The leading woman depicted in the film, Katherine Johnson, had gone to work for NASA in 1953. (She died two years ago at age 101.)

Part of the film version of the story depicted another of the black women mathematicians urging the use of a large computer for the Manned Space Center; but certainly no one had desktops yet in that era.

Don't know how old you are, but I remember when a publishing company I did business with in the 1970's installed a mainframe computer. The hardware was the size of a U-Haul delivery van, and they had to build a temperature-controlled room and extensive air-conditioning to house it—just to do word processing for typography, not terabytes of math. Today we have more computing power in our phones.

The entire trajectory of tech development is "more reach, smaller size, cheaper per unit of measurement."

There's a great moment in the 1995 film Apollo 13 about NASA's first lunar mission in 1970. The Houston control center was depicted with two or three rows of dozens of desktop computer stations where engineers in short-sleeved white dress shirts and neckties were tensely monitoring the voice communications with the astronauts as they approached the moon. Some glitch came up, and after a moment of extreme panic, they all suddenly whipped out their slide rules! (It's been almost 30 years since I saw the movie, so I hope my recollection is correct, but that should give you an idea how powerful a moment it was—and I'm a writer, not a STEM person.)

[MD Expat in PA]

Part of the film version of the story depicted another of the black women mathematicians urging the use of a large computer for the Manned Space Center; but certainly no one had desktops yet in that era.

Dorothy Vaughn. A remarkable woman as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Vaughan

[Albion Wilde]

Some glitch came up

PS
This restrained but very dramatic moment in the film popularized the now-familiar saying, "Houston, we have a problem."

[Reily]

I programmed on the IBM 360 through the 1970s At my first job I programmed on one of the first commercially available minicomputers - SEL32. Minicomputers is not even a distinction any more. My main objection with the movie was the implication the missions would have been impossible without those women mathematicians. They were talented and good at their jobs but not the only people there capable of understanding orbital mechanics and programming it into the main frame or minicomputer. Orbital mechanics basically started with Newton, then a host of European mathematicians improved on it. Every physics and aerospace engineering student studies it, even back then. Might have even programmed the equations up on an analog computer, maybe even a mainframe digital computer if available. It was a team effort something g barely acknowledged by the movie.