The year was 1945. The clacking of adding machines and clouds of cigarette smoke filled a university-owned row house along Walnut Street in Philadelphia. Inside, dozens of women calculated trajectories to help wartime artillary gunners take aim. Men, the army reasoned, lacked the patience for such tedium-a single problem might require months of work.
The army called the women "computors". One of them, Jean Bartik, was a 20 year old math prodigy recruited from the farms of Missouri. Another, Betty Holberton, was the granddaughter od an astronomer who spent her childhood steeped in classical literature and language. The women formed a tight fellowship, drawn together by youth, brains, and the war effort.....
One day, word spread that the brightest "computors" were needed to work on a new machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computor, or ENIAC- a steel behemoth, 100 feet long and 10 feet high, built of 17,480 vacuum tube in an engineering building at the University of Philadelphia.It was the first electronic computor, intended to automate thr trajectory calculations that the female computors performed by hand.
Runnung the ENIAC required setting dozens of dials and plugging a ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of the machine, a different configuration for every problem. It was this job- "programming" they came to call it- to which just six of the young women were assigned;Marilyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum,Kay Antonelli, and Frances Spence as well as Ms. Bartik and Ms. Holberton. They had no users guide. there was no operating system or computor languages, just hardware and human logic. "The ENIAC was a son-of-a-bitch to program" Says Bartik.
The first task was breaking down complex differential equations into the smallest possible steps. Each of these had to be routed to the proper bank of electronics and performed in sequence. Every datum and instruction had to reach the correct location in time for the opertaion that depended on it, to within 1/5000th of a second.
Despite this complexity, the Army brass considered the programming to be clerical work; that it was women stringing the cables only reinforced this notion.Their government- job ratingwas SP, as in "subprofessional" Initially, they were prohibited as securioty risks, from even entering the ENIAC room, forcing them to learn the machine from wiring diagrams.When finally admitted, they had to straighten the clutter of gear the engineers left overnight.
Finally, in February 1946, the scientists were ready for the official ENIAC official unvieling.A test problem involving the trajectory of a 155 mm shell was handed to Jean Bartik and Better Holberton for programming. The machine performed flawlessly, calculating the trajector in less time than it would take the shell to land. After the demonstation, the men went out for a celebratory dinner. The programmers went home.
In the 50 plus years since, their legacy is confined mainly to movietone footage and sepia photos.-women standing alongside the machine, as if modeling a frigidaire. Why was history so ungenerous? Partly because in the awe surrounding the machine itself, the hardware was seen as the whole story.In addition,three of the programmers married engineers with top jobs on the ENIAC, making them wives first in the eyes of history makers and history writers.
A copious, definitive history of the ENIAC, written by the Army ordnance officer who commanded the project, merely lists the programmers names [misspelling one of them] and identifies which of the engineers they married.
The greater injustice is not historys' treatment of the women, but its' resistance to revision.... For example, until an enthusiastic historian made an issue of it, most of the programmers had not even been invited to the gala dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary if the ENIAC.
The army called the women "computors". One of them, Jean Bartik, was a 20 year old math prodigy recruited from the farms of Missouri. Another, Betty Holberton, was the granddaughter od an astronomer who spent her childhood steeped in classical literature and language. The women formed a tight fellowship, drawn together by youth, brains, and the war effort.....
One day, word spread that the brightest "computors" were needed to work on a new machine called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computor, or ENIAC- a steel behemoth, 100 feet long and 10 feet high, built of 17,480 vacuum tube in an engineering building at the University of Philadelphia.It was the first electronic computor, intended to automate thr trajectory calculations that the female computors performed by hand.
Runnung the ENIAC required setting dozens of dials and plugging a ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of the machine, a different configuration for every problem. It was this job- "programming" they came to call it- to which just six of the young women were assigned;Marilyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum,Kay Antonelli, and Frances Spence as well as Ms. Bartik and Ms. Holberton. They had no users guide. there was no operating system or computor languages, just hardware and human logic. "The ENIAC was a son-of-a-bitch to program" Says Bartik.
The first task was breaking down complex differential equations into the smallest possible steps. Each of these had to be routed to the proper bank of electronics and performed in sequence. Every datum and instruction had to reach the correct location in time for the opertaion that depended on it, to within 1/5000th of a second.
Despite this complexity, the Army brass considered the programming to be clerical work; that it was women stringing the cables only reinforced this notion.Their government- job ratingwas SP, as in "subprofessional" Initially, they were prohibited as securioty risks, from even entering the ENIAC room, forcing them to learn the machine from wiring diagrams.When finally admitted, they had to straighten the clutter of gear the engineers left overnight.
Finally, in February 1946, the scientists were ready for the official ENIAC official unvieling.A test problem involving the trajectory of a 155 mm shell was handed to Jean Bartik and Better Holberton for programming. The machine performed flawlessly, calculating the trajector in less time than it would take the shell to land. After the demonstation, the men went out for a celebratory dinner. The programmers went home.
In the 50 plus years since, their legacy is confined mainly to movietone footage and sepia photos.-women standing alongside the machine, as if modeling a frigidaire. Why was history so ungenerous? Partly because in the awe surrounding the machine itself, the hardware was seen as the whole story.In addition,three of the programmers married engineers with top jobs on the ENIAC, making them wives first in the eyes of history makers and history writers.
A copious, definitive history of the ENIAC, written by the Army ordnance officer who commanded the project, merely lists the programmers names [misspelling one of them] and identifies which of the engineers they married.
The greater injustice is not historys' treatment of the women, but its' resistance to revision.... For example, until an enthusiastic historian made an issue of it, most of the programmers had not even been invited to the gala dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary if the ENIAC.
