In the good old days, computers looked like this. “Computer” was a job, not a tool, and it was often done by a woman who was quick with figures.
These computers worked for the High-Speed Flight Research Station of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, crunching the numbers that came in from flight instruments so that we could figure out how to make jet planes and rockets work.
You can read more about the Dryden computers and the MUROC Flight Test Unit in the NASA archives here, where I found this picture.