OS-X ENIAC: Long before Gates or Jobs, 6 women programmed the first digital computer

[NC Susan]

www.digitaltrends.com/computing/rem...ammers&k_clickid=177819062&utm_content=naLong before Gates or Jobs, 6 women programmed the first digital computer
By Brad Jones and Luke Larsen — Posted on March 1, 2019 2:05PM PST

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Ester Gerston and Gloria Gordon work on the ENIAC computer U.S. Army/ARL Technical Library Archives
The first computer had a strange, fascinating beginning.

Its construction in the 1940s marked a major milestone in computing’s early history, being involved with research into the hydrogen bomb. It’s celebrated every year on February 15 (ENIAC Day), but it’s just as appropriate to pay it some attention during Women’s History Month in March.

You’d never know from the history books, but the job of programming the first computer fell on a team of six young women. Their contribution to its success was largely glossed over in the years that followed, but all of that has changed. The truth about how the first computer was programmed is a story of that needs to continue to be retold.

ENIAC Women Programmers

U.S. Army/ARL Technical Library Archives
THE BIRTH OF PROGRAMMING

The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or ENIAC, was the world’s first electronic digital computer, a landmark accomplishment on our journey towards the technological era we’re living in at present. Financed by the United States Army, it would prove to be an invaluable tool in calculating artillery firing tables and early research into the hydrogen bomb.

Even a group dedicated to furthering the status of women in the tech industry had no knowledge.
The creation of ENIAC is a remarkable story in its own right, but there’s an extra facet hidden just beneath its surface. While the design of the computer is credited to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, the programming of the system fell to a remarkable group of women: Fran Bilas, Betty Jennings, Ruth Lichterman, Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, and Marlyn Wescoff.

Despite the trailblazing work the six women did, they’re likely not names that you’re familiar with. Back then, computers were programmed through a physical system of adjusting switches and cables manually — debugging a program meant climbing inside the ENIAC in search of faulty connections. A new program had to first be sketched out on paper, then implemented with extreme precision. Setting up a single calculation could take days, and a full program could take weeks.


The programmers were picked for the task because of their acumen calculating ballistics tables with a desk calculator and a differential analyzer before the ENIAC could be implemented. However, the technical mastery required to operate such a system wasn’t thought of as a major contribution to the overall process. The women who programmed ENIAC were considered to be mere operators, rather than given their due as a key component of the group of people that made the project a success.

LOOKING BACK AT ENIAC

In 1996 — the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC project — a woman named Kathryn Kleiman sought to do her part to preserve the legacy of a group of women that had made an impact on her life. Inspired by the work of the ENIAC programmers during her studies at Harvard in the 1980s, Kleiman contacted the organizers of the Women in Technology International annual conference to see how they were planning to mark the fifty-year milestone.

The next year, Kleiman would recount in an interview with Wired just how surprised she was to find that the organization had no knowledge of the women she was referring to. Their work had been so thoroughly swept under the rug that even a group dedicated to furthering the status of women in the tech industry had no knowledge of the work ENIAC programmers had accomplished five decades earlier.

Patsy Simmers, holding ENIAC board; Gail Taylor, holding EDVAC board; Milly Beck, holding ORDVAC board; and Norma Stec, holding BRLESC-I board.
Patsy Simmers, holding ENIAC board; Gail Taylor, holding EDVAC board; Milly Beck, holding ORDVAC board; and Norma Stec, holding BRLESC-I board. U.S. Army/ARL Technical Library Archives
To this day, Kleiman continues her work to circulate the story of the ENIAC programmers. For the past few years, she’s been working on a documentary called The Computers, which saw its first theatrical tour earlier in 2015. Hopefully, the film will be able to share the work of the ENIAC programmers with an even broader audience.

There are two elements to the importance of the ENIAC programmers receiving this recognition. Of course, it’s only right that they should be acknowledged for their work, even though the six women at the core of the group have now passed away. However, the impact that their story could have on the next generation of women embarking on careers in the tech industry can’t be understated.


Looking for some insight on the prominence of the ENIAC programmers today, I spoke to the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival.”These people were pioneers of the tech industry — and they were predominantly women,” she said. “It’s not something that’s commonly known, and it’s not something that’s being emphasized to people.”

Women Who Code is an organization that’s committed to helping women move into technology-focused careers, as well as championing success stories large and small. That could be the completion of the ENIAC system, or it could be a teenager running her first “Hello World” program.

“I had been a programmer for quite a while before I heard about the ENIAC women.”
Like many people working in the tech sector at present, Percival came to the industry having begun her working career elsewhere. According to her, there are more ways into such fields than ever before, many of which don’t require formal training at a technical college as a pre-requisite. However, that isn’t having the expected effect on the proportion of women taking on these careers.

“Just in the past 30 years, we’ve seen the number of women in technology drop from around 40 percent to closer to the 25 percent mark,” she tells me.

There are countless factors that shape those statistics, and the lack of well-known female accomplishments plays a big role. Perhaps if we heard more about the ENIAC programmers, and similar stories of women making significant contributions to the world of tech, there would be more young women eager to make their own mark on the industry.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Sarah Allen began programming at the age of twelve, started a company fresh from completing her Computer Science degree, and was in the second class of Presidential Innovation Fellows in 2013. You might recognize her name thanks to her work on Flash video and Adobe After Effects.

Sarah Allen Programmer
Brian Ireley/Smithsonian Institute
“I had been a programmer for quite a while before I heard about the ENIAC women,” she told me when I asked of her familiarity with the group. Allen came across their story as part of research into the history of computing, which would eventually lead her to Kathryn Kleiman.

“When I was leaving college, I was under the misconception that women had started programming in the ’60s and ’70s,” Allen said. “People told me that I was a pioneer, because I was a woman in the field.”

The uncovering of a secret history of women programmers should have offered up a message of empowerment. However, the very fact that the accomplishments of the ENIAC programmers had been folded into those of the men that designed the system puts quite a different spin on the story. A trailblazer’s lead can’t be followed if her work is immediately obscured.

Bringing women into the world of technology is just the first step.
Thankfully, efforts are being made to ensure that doesn’t happen. Kathryn Kleiman has put together her film on ENIAC and is screening it around the country. Alaina Percival continues to lead Women Who Code in carrying out projects to establish an international community of women in the industry.

And Sarah Allen continues to share her ideology that programming is a life skill — a stance that will surely become increasingly common over the next decade. In 2009 she co-founded RailsBridge, an organization that promotes diversity in tech through easily accessible teaching workshops that are open to all.

Bringing women into the world of technology is just the first step. Allen has a laundry list of organizations looking to make the industry more diverse — the Level Playing Field Institute, Black Girls Code and #YesWeCode to name just a few. However, she also has some straightforward advice for any woman taking their first steps into a career in technology.

“There is a normal where men and boys actually just respect you, as a peer. Those are the organizations, and those are the groups that you should be looking towards.”

This article was originally published in August 2015. It’s been updated for modern context. It is part of a continuing series of stories in which we look at the great contributions women have made to technology — past and present — as well as the hurdles they faced and the foundations for the future they’ve laid for the next generations of women in technology.

 

[NC Susan]

Ester Gerston and Gloria Gordon work on the ENIAC computer U.S. Army/ARL Technical Library Archives

 

[NC Susan]

www.wired.com/1997/05/women-proto-programmers-get-their-just-reward/

Women Proto-Programmers Get Their Just Reward

Fifty years after they programmed the unwieldy ENIAC computer, the world's first programmers are stepping into the public eye, and - surprise - they are women. Long overlooked in the annals of computer history, the six women will finally receive group recognition for their work at next month's Women in Technology conference.

The women - Kay Mauchley Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton (also known for her work with Cobol), Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum - will receive the Hall of Fame award from the Women in Technology International, an association that promotes the value of women in the industry.

The ENIAC, the world's first computer, was invented to calculate ballistics trajectories during World War II - a task that until then had been done by hand by a group of 80 female mathematicians. The six women who were chosen to make the ENIAC work toiled six-day weeks during the war, inventing the field of programming as they worked. But although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the women were classified as "sub-professionals" presumably due to their gender and as a cost-saving device, and never got the credit due to them for their groundbreaking work.

"Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time, and no one looked back," explains Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of WITI. "It's a typical problem in a male-dominated industry. And there's still a lot of frustration with men taking credit for women's ideas - it doesn't seem to have changed much over the last 50 years."

But although the women had been categorized as "clerks," they were rediscovered by a Harvard student named Kathryn Kleiman in 1986, during her research for a paper on women in computing. When the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC computer rolled around last year, Kleiman - now an Internet lawyer at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth - decided that it was time to get the women the recognition they deserved.

"I called and asked what they were doing to honor the ENIAC programmers, and they said, 'Who?'" says Kleiman.

Although two women were given recognition at the conference, the rest weren't even invited to the reception. But Kleiman's ongoing quest to reveal the forgotten story of the six women has gotten the ball rolling on public awareness: A Wall Street Journal article was written about the women last year, and has become a minor Net meme. California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo has been working to name a day in honor of the ENIAC programmers, although her efforts were delayed when Congress stopped allowing commemorative days. And Kleiman herself is coordinating a broadcast-quality oral history with the ENIAC women, which will eventually be turned into a documentary.

The women's pioneering role in the industry, Kleiman and WITI believe, will serve as inspiration for girls, to help them avoid the "math is for boys" mentality, as well as to women in the programming industry. And so far, their efforts seem to be working: The ENIAC women are currently in Seattle, where they were invited to give a lecture at Microsoft to its Hoppers group of women programmers.

Offers Kleiman, "I hope it provides wonderful role models so that girls and women know that they have as much of a right to go into the computer industry as men do."

 

[NC Susan]

ENIAC - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
Coordinates: 39°57′08″N 75°11′28″W / 39.9522012°N 75.1909932°WCoordinates: 39°57′08″N 75°11′28″W / 39.9522012°N 75.1909932°W
Location: University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
PHMC dedicated: Thursday, June 15, 2000

Overview

ENIAC (/ˈiːniæk, ˈɛ-/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was amongst the earliest electronic general-purpose computers made. It was Turing-complete, digital and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.

Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.

ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.

ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. The combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems, as ENIAC calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours (allowing one ENIAC hour to displace 2,400 human hours). The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946 and formally dedicated the next day at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000 (approximately $6,300,000 today). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The total cost was about $487,000, equivalent to $7,051,000 in 2018.[12] The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering[13] the following month, under the code name "Project PX", with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator. Herman H. Goldstine persuaded the Army to fund the project, which put him in charge to oversee it for them.[14]

ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.[15] The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Frank Mural (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis (accumulators).[16] In 1946, the researchers resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.

ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators that could not only add and subtract, but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across several general-purpose buses (or trays, as they were called). In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer and trigger the next operation, all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations, depending on the sign of a computed result.

Components
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Learn moreThis section needs additional citations for verification.
By the end of its operation in 1956, ENIAC contained 20,000 vacuum tubes; 7,200 crystal diodes; 1,500 relays; 70,000 resistors; 10,000 capacitors; and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4 m × 0.9 m × 30 m (8 ft × 3 ft × 98 ft) in size, occupied 167 m2 (1,800 sq ft) and consumed 150 kW of electricity.[17][18] This power requirement led to the rumor that whenever the computer was switched on, lights in Philadelphia dimmed.[19] Input was possible from an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, such as the IBM 405. While ENIAC had no system to store memory in its inception, these punch cards could be used for external memory storage.[20] In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC.[21]

ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit required 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting" pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter "wrapped around", the idea being to electronically emulate the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine.

ENIAC had 20 ten-digit signed accumulators, which used ten's complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another accumulator or a constant transmitter) per second. It was possible to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak speed of operation was potentially much higher, due to parallel operation.


Cpl. Irwin Goldstein (foreground) sets the switches on one of ENIAC's function tables at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army photo)[22]
It was possible to wire the carry of one accumulator into another accumulator to perform double precision arithmetic, but the accumulator carry circuit timing prevented the wiring of three or more for even higher precision. ENIAC used four of the accumulators (controlled by a special multiplier unit) to perform up to 385 multiplication operations per second; five of the accumulators were controlled by a special divider/square-rooter unit to perform up to 40 division operations per second or three square root operations per second.

The other nine units in ENIAC were the initiating unit (started and stopped the machine), the cycling unit (used for synchronizing the other units), the master programmer (controlled loop sequencing), the reader (controlled an IBM punch-card reader), the printer (controlled an IBM card punch), the constant transmitter, and three function tables.[23][24]

Operation times
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The references by Rojas and Hashagen (or Wilkes)[15] give more details about the times for operations, which differ somewhat from those stated above.

The basic machine cycle was 200 microseconds (20 cycles of the 100 kHz clock in the cycling unit), or 5,000 cycles per second for operations on the 10-digit numbers. In one of these cycles, ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add/subtract two numbers.

A multiplication of a 10-digit number by a d-digit number (for d up to 10) took d+4 cycles, so a 10- by 10-digit multiplication took 14 cycles, or 2,800 microseconds—a rate of 357 per second. If one of the numbers had fewer than 10 digits, the operation was faster.

Division and square roots took 13(d+1) cycles, where d is the number of digits in the result (quotient or square root). So a division or square root took up to 143 cycles, or 28,600 microseconds—a rate of 35 per second. (Wilkes 1956:20[15] states that a division with a 10 digit quotient required 6 milliseconds.) If the result had fewer than ten digits, it was obtained faster.

Reliability
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ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7s, 6SJ7s, 6SA7s and 6AC7s were used in logic functions.[25] Numerous 6L6s and 6V6s served as line drivers to drive pulses through cables between rack assemblies.

Several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving ENIAC nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. Engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to an interview in 1989 with Eckert, "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes."[26] In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours—close to five days.


A function table from ENIAC on display at Aberdeen Proving Ground museum.