Question about "Hidden Figures" movie....

[Silver Surfer]

Great movie btw....but I noticed a lil bit of exaggeration.....

There is a scene with Octavia Spencer character where in the movie it comes across as she was the person that "cracked the code" on how to use Nasa brand new IBM mainframe....

I know the women were pioneers and all but cmon...thats not how that situation played out.....

 

[...o3]

...if the sistas say that's how it went down, i'm inclined to believe them.

 

[Geek Nasty]

So correct the record with your sources then?

 

[Numpsay]

#cacalert

 

[xXOGLEGENDXx]

It's a movie breh not a documentary

 

[Freedman]

Fortran doesn't seem all that difficult. Why is it so hard to believe A black woman was one of the best at the time using it especially since she had been studying and it had just came out

 

[get these nets]

OP
You've sat through biopic with distortions before. Do you nitpick all of them, or just the ones based on Black women?

 

[Geek Nasty]

It was also bullshyt that Kevin Costner tore down the whites only signs and let the women watch the launch with them.

But the white savior narrative always has to get squeezed in somewhere.

 

[invalid]

My grandmother’s brilliant sister was the first black person to be hired as a programmer for BP Amoco. And she rose through the ranks to lead her department and become an executive. Heard countless stories on how she knew more than her white male counterparts and had to train them. So I believe it.

According to NASA, Dorothy Vaughn was a FORTRAN expert.

Dorothy Vaughan and many of the former West Computers joined the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group on the frontier of electronic computing. Dorothy Vaughan became an expert FORTRAN programmer, and she also contributed to the Scout Launch Vehicle Program.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/dorothy-vaughan-biography

 

[Ethnic Vagina Finder]

The film primarily focuses on John Glenn's 1962 trip around the globe and does add dramatic flourishes that are, well, Hollywood. However, most of the events in the movie are historically accurate. Johnson's main job in the lead-up and during the mission was to double-check and reverse engineer the newly-installed IBM 7090s trajectory calculations. As it shows, there were very tense moments during the flight that forced the mission to end earlier than expected. And John Glenn did request that Johnson specifically check and confirm trajectories and entry points that the IBM spat out (albeit, perhaps, not at the exact moment that the movie depicts). As Shetterly wrote in her book and explained in a September NPR interview, Glenn did not completely trust the computer. So, he asked the head engineers to "get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good... I'm ready to go."

While Johnson is the main character, Hidden Figures also follows the trajectories of Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as they work on the Friendship Seven blast-off. Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) was one of NASA's early computer hires during World War II. She became a leader and advocate for the "West Computers." In 1948, she became NASA's first black supervisor and, later, an expert FORTRAN programmer.