The first successful commercial computer, ENIAC, was programmed by a University of Pennsylvania group known as "The First Programmers Club". The ENIAC was an 80-foot computer that required hours on end of painstaking work to do calculations and test processes. All this work was done by the members of The First Programmers Club: all of them women, with Betty Holberton at the helm.
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator
With the start of World War II, Holberton, along with about 70 other women, was hired by the US Army to calculate ballistics trajectories at the Army's base on UPenn's campus. Many women were hired in part due to the thought that this computing was only menial clerical work. However they did not realize that this work would lead to the dawn of the modern computing and programming age. After successfully programming ENAIC, Betty Holberton went on create numeric controls for UNIVAC (one of the first general-use computers), and helped develop COBOL with Grace Hopper, and FORTRAN, another computer language.
Why don't we know about these women?
Until recently, the work of many women in the history of computer science has been largely unrecognized. In the case of the ENIAC programmers, their involvement was even covered up. Though photos existed of the female team working on the computer, the puublic was told these were merely "Refrigerator Ladies" - female models hired to pose with the machine. These female programmers were not even permitted at the celebratory ceremony after the first launch of the machine, leaving the male engineers involved in the project to recieve all the credit.
© 2023 by MY SITE NAME. Proudly created with Wix.com