Ida Rhodes and the dreams of a human computer

In the spring of 1952, Ida Rhodes outlined her vision of the digital future in a talk entitled "The human computer's dreams of the future", which she gave in Los Angeles at a conference sponsored by the Institute of Radio Engineers, a precursor of the IEEE Computer Society. Rhodes described an electronic computer and a computing environment surprisingly similar to present computers and the world in which we work. At times, her descriptions cause the modern reader to wonder why this modest computer scientist is not better known. She described the rise of desktop computers, the use of high-level programming languages, the ubiquity of video displays and the development of graphical user interfaces.