back in those days being the "lead programmer" was the same as being a "human computer".
>The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century (the first known written reference dates from 1613),[1] meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.
>"The human computer is supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail." (Turing, 1950) Teams of people were frequently used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel.
>For some men, being a computer was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements. For women the occupation was generally closed, with some exceptions such as Mary Edwards who worked from the 1780s to 1815 as one of thirty five computers for the British Nautical Almanac used for navigation at sea. This changed in the late nineteenth century with Edward Charles Pickering.[3] Many of the women astronomers from this era were computers with possibly the best known being Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who worked with Pickering from 1893.
>Human computers played integral roles in the World War II war effort in the United States, and because of the depletion of the male labor force due to the draft, many computers during World War II were women, frequently with degrees in mathematics. In the Manhattan Project, human computers, working with a variety of mechanical aids, assisted numerical studies of the complex formulas related to nuclear fission.[7] Because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC (the premiere general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II) were drafted from a corps of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women. These were Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.