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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women in computing | 3/10 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:17:23.795787+00:00 | kb-cron |
The programmers of the ENIAC computer in 1944, were six female mathematicians; Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Kathleen Antonelli, Ruth Teitelbaum, Jean Bartik, and Frances Spence, who were human computers at the Moore School's computation lab. Adele Goldstine was their teacher and trainer and they were known as the "ENIAC girls." The women who worked on ENIAC were warned that they would not be promoted into professional ratings which were only for men. Designing the hardware was "men's work" and programming the software was "women's work." Sometimes women were given blueprints and wiring diagrams to figure out how the machine worked and how to program it. They learned how the ENIAC worked by repairing it, sometimes crawling through the computer, and by fixing "bugs" in the machinery. Even though the programmers were supposed to be doing the "soft" work of programming, in reality, they did that and fully understood and worked with the hardware of the ENIAC. When the ENIAC was revealed in 1946, Goldstine and the other women prepared the machine and the demonstration programs it ran for the public. None of their work in preparing the demonstrations was mentioned in the official accounts of the public events. After the demonstration, the university hosted an expensive celebratory dinner to which none of the ENIAC six were invited. In Canada, Beatrice Worsley started working at the National Research Council of Canada in 1947 where she was an aerodynamics research officer. A year later, she started working in the new Computational Centre at the University of Toronto. She built a differential analyzer in 1948 and also worked with IBM machines in order to do calculations for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. She went to study the EDSAC at the University of Cambridge in 1949. She wrote the program that was run the first time EDSAC performed its first calculations on May 6, 1949. Grace Hopper was the first person to create a compiler for a programming language and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, an electro-mechanical computer based on Analytical Engine. Hopper's work with computers started in 1943, when she started working at the Bureau of Ordnance's Computation Project at Harvard where she programmed the Harvard Mark I. Hopper not only programmed the computer, but created a 500-page comprehensive manual for it. Even though Hopper created the manual, which was widely cited and published, she was not specifically credited in it. Hopper is often credited with the coining of the term "bug" and "debugging" when a moth caused the Mark II to malfunction. While a moth was found and the process of removing it called "debugging," the terms were already part of the language of programmers.
=== 1950s ===
Grace Hopper continued to contribute to computer science through the 1950s. She brought the idea of using compilers from her time at Harvard to UNIVAC which she joined in 1949. Other women who were hired to program UNIVAC included Adele Mildred Koss, Frances E. Holberton, Jean Bartik, Frances Morello and Lillian Jay. To program the UNIVAC, Hopper and her team used the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which she developed. Holberton wrote a code, C-10, that allowed for keyboard inputs into a general-purpose computer. Holberton also developed the Sort-Merge Generator in 1951 which was used on the UNIVAC I. The Sort-Merge Generator marked the first time a computer "used a program to write a program." Holberton suggested that computer housing should be beige or oatmeal in color which became a long-lasting trend. Koss worked with Hopper on various algorithms and a program that was a precursor to a report generator. Klara Dan von Neumann was one of the main programmers of the MANIAC, a more advanced version of ENIAC. Her work helped the field of meteorology and weather prediction. Mary Tsingou developed and ran code on MANIAC to model the evolution of interacting waves on a string, a problem suggested by Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam. They discovered a paradox whereby a system expected to thermalise instead showed quasi-periodic behaviour. The problem became known as the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem, and spawned the use of computers for numerical experiments in nonlinear science. The NACA, and subsequently NASA, recruited women computers following World War II. By the 1950s, a team was performing mathematical calculations at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, including Annie Easley, Katherine Johnson and Kathryn Peddrew. At the National Bureau of Standards, Margaret R. Fox was hired to work as part of the technical staff of the Electronic Computer Laboratory in 1951. In 1956, Gladys West was hired by the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory as a human computer. West was involved in calculations that let to the development of GPS. At Convair Aircraft Corporation, Joyce Currie Little was one of the original programmers for analyzing data received from the wind tunnels. She used punch cards on an IBM 650 which was located in a different building from the wind tunnel. To save time in the physical delivery of the punch cards, she and her colleague, Maggie DeCaro, put on roller skates to get to and from the building faster. In Israel, Thelma Estrin worked on the design and development of WEIZAC, one of the world's first large-scale programmable electronic computers. In the Soviet Union a team of women helped design and build the first digital computer in 1951. In the UK, Kathleen Booth worked with her husband, Andrew Booth on several computers at Birkbeck College. Kathleen Booth was the programmer and Andrew built the machines. Kathleen developed Assembly Language at this time. Mary Coombs (of England) was employed in 1952 as the first female programmer to work on the LEO computers, and as such she is recognized as the first female commercial programmer. Ukrainian Kateryna Yushchenko created Address (programming language) for the cоmputer "Kyiv" in 1955 and invented indirect addressing of the highest rank, called pointers.
=== 1960s ===