[MaysonL]

60 years ago, I never got to debug my first assembly program, which had 1 syntax error and an unknown number of bugs, because NASA launched a weather satellite, data from which monopolized the 7090 which the high school enrichmment program was having programs run on. Still rankles a bit.

[nobodyandproud]

I’ve recently been disillusioned in my admiration for NASA.

How NASA used a child math prodigy back in the 1970s: “ At that time, I led my life like a machine – I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept, and so forth. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I was lonely and had no friends.”

Career scientists and engineers using a kid like this? Pretty scummy in my book.

Compare that to how Srinivasa Ramanujan was treated nearly a century earlier by the British.

Sadly, your schools’s computer time wouldnt have made anyone blink.

[npteljes]

If it's the British and the treatment of the brilliant people, the story that comes to mind is of Alan Turing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Homosexuality_and_...

[nobodyandproud]

Very poor example.

Technical brilliance didn't protect Alan Turing from a badly-written sex law pushed out in 1885, but technical brilliance wasn't the cause of his mistreatment.

Whereas it was technical brilliance that made a young, 8-year-old 210 iq child the target of exploitation by NASA in an era where child-exploitation was already frowned upon for decades.

And of course, in the height of irony one of the aims of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_Amendment_Act_188... was to protect the very young; so a very poor example indeed.