Sub-professional and Sub-scientific
Featuring 'Bisque of Lobster', 'Filet Mignon', 'Broiled Salmon Steak', Cognac, and Cigars, the menu clearly offered an indulgent dining experience. The year was 1946, and the who's who from the army, industry and academia were all in attendance. It was a night of celebrations, a victory worth cherishing. After all, it’s not every day you celebrate the birth of the world's first ever programmable, electronic, digital, general-purpose computer. Victory laps, pats on the back—the night was meant to honour those who made it happen.
Not quite though, because on that glittery night when everything seemed alright, it wasn't. The people in charge made some truly glaring omissions in choosing the ones to celebrate. The trouble was not so much with the people they chose but rather the ones they decided to ignore. The ones they intentionally overlooked; the ones they chose not to invite; they deserved more than a mere invitation. They ought to have been celebrated alongside Mauchly and Eckert, but instead, they were relegated to being a footnote in someone else’s biography, and that just wasn't right. They were worthy of far more, and without a doubt, deserved better.
It was the Second World War, and the US army needed firing tables, and they needed them fast. What's a firing table, you may ask? By the beginning of the 20th century, firearms and artillery had emerged capable of targeting objects well beyond our visual range. In fact, hitting a target situated 5 to 10 miles away was no longer a challenge. Nevertheless, this technological progress brought forth a distinct challenge: the inability to visually discern the intended target. Consequently, it became imperative to predict the trajectory of a shot prior to firing. This specific problem of figuring out the trajectory of a projectile gave birth to a special 'branch' of maths called ‘mathematical theory of ballistics’, and eventually, we'd have our first firing tables. A firing table was designed to enable the artillerymen solve their "fire" problem.
But since each artillery/gun of a particular make was different from the other, they each required their own firing table. But as it happens, back in the day, creating those tables wasn't easy. The process involved precisely measuring the effects produced by even the smallest changes on the path of projectiles. To accomplish this effectively, we needed to factor in a whole host of variables, such as wind speed, the outside temperature, weather conditions and what not. After factoring in all these elements and then some, what we'd be left with would be a bunch of equations- a very specific set of differential calculus equations. "It took thirty to forty hours to calculate just one trajectory by hand. It was an [awful] lot of work for a missile that would reach its target in about forty seconds."1
Late 1930s, with the war rearing its ugly head, the US army needed folks with graduate-level skills in maths who could solve these equations. However, with men away, fighting the war, guess who the army turned to for help? The women, of course. Interestingly enough, people recruited to perform these calculations were called ‘computers’. Yup! Back in the day, being a computer was a job; it was an occupation. Despite the fact, that you needed a fairly sophisticated understanding of numerical analysis, differential calculus, and a general background in maths and science to be good at what you did, there was barely any prestige associated with the role.
In fact, the civil service grade for this role was SP, where SP stood for ‘subprofessional and subscientific.’ The Army knew that the young women were so anxious to help their country they would not argue over rank. The rule was simple: only men were allowed to get the professional “P” ratings. Ultimately, even an astronomer with her PhD from Harvard would be classified as SP.2
By 1943, and for the remainder of World War 2, essentially all computers were women, as were their direct supervisors. But for this future to come to fruition, it all started in the early 1940s when the US Army needed to recruit a heck of a lot of women mathematicians. To achieve this, the army would send one Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, a mathematician, to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering to set up and head its Philadelphia computing section.
The war raged on, and women turned out to be excellent at their jobs. Sadly though, it just wasn't enough; there was always more to do. Constant major improvements were being made to the existing artillery, while at the same time, they kept producing new artillery, all at an unprecedented rate. However, all these improvements and advancements were useless without the firing tables. None of this weaponry could be shipped to the battlefields without these tables, and the friggin problem was they just couldn't be produced fast enough. And by March 1943, Herman Goldstine, in charge of the whole endeavour, was at his wit's end.
The troubles were mounting, and hope seemed to be in short supply but it was right around then that one research associate by the name of Joe Chapline decided to approach Goldstine. In doing so, he would go on to alter the very course of computing history. He saw a visibly upset Goldstine and told him "You ought to talk to a guy upstairs named Mauchly. He has some ideas about how to do it electronically.”3
John Mauchly was 35 when he met Herman Goldstine, a brilliant physicist who also happened to love teaching. Truth be told, he was quite the showman when he was at it. In fact, when he taught physics a few years earlier at Ursinus in Pennsylvania, "people [would] drive miles to hear his end-of-term pre-Christmas lecture."4
As a physicist, his work too entailed dealing with a lot of staggeringly tedious calculations, and like many others before him, he too dreamt of a machine which could do these calculations for him. However, here's how John was different from the rest. For him it wasn't just a mere dream.
And this is how the story unfolded: Herman met John. John proposed a machine he hoped to build and said, "[This device] would be able to perform 1,000 multiplications per second, and [thus be able] to [do] complete trajectories in a minute or two."5 Not days, not hours, but minutes! Herman didn't walk into this meeting to have his socks knocked off, but by the end of their discussion, that is precisely what had happened. For his part, Herman would get John the funding.
With everything in place, all John needed now was an engineer, someone who also believed in the same vision, and luckily for him and, perhaps for the rest of us, he did find one. It must not have been easy, though, because, you see, back in the day, the conventional wisdom was "that an all-electronic computer was impossible and unnecessary. It would require far too many vacuum tubes to operate for longer than a few seconds, and everyone knew that vacuum tubes were unreliable."6
But J. Presper Eckert, a brilliant young man in his early twenties, an engineer, didn't give two hoots about convention. He believed, like John, that they could build a computer with vacuum tubes. And as a matter of fact, they did.
But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before any of it could become a reality, they had to assemble a team first. Eventually they did manage to hire a lot of engineers to work on the project, additionally they also ended up recruiting 6 women computers. They were:
3. Kay McNulty
And after multiple delays and numerous setbacks, John and Pres had managed to pull off the unexpected: 8 feet tall, 80 feet wide, and weighing an impressive 30 tons! The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC for short, the world's first ever electronic, digital, general-purpose computer was born.
ENIAC undoubtedly was a triumph of human engineering and ingenuity, but it still needed to be programmed, and guess who was put in charge of this unprecedented challenge? The women on the team.
The ENIAC was ready, but not the security clearances. While waiting for approvals, the women were handed down blueprints of this ginormous machine, which they had never even seen, and that was it. They were now supposed to figure out the rest. As Kay would recall years later, "We didn’t know that there would be so little documentation that would be available to us" and Jean would add, "So they gave us these great big block diagrams… and we were supposed to study them and figure out how to program it and how the thing worked. Well, obviously, we had no idea what we were doing"..."We knew we were supposed to run the machine and set up problems for the machine, but no one had any techniques or anything".7
Mind you, this was the world's first ever electronic digital computer. There were no operating systems, programming languages or compilers. As Tom Petzinger of the Wall Street Journal so eloquently puts it, the women of ENIAC were its operating system.8
And for their part, these women worked equally hard if not harder than their male counterparts, and it wasn't just that they worked hard; but they also had the smarts. They did everything possible to make the programs run efficiently. As Betty said "we could have programmed the machine in serial, but we could not waste a single micro-second. And that’s what made us do everything in parallel." Kay would go on to add "There were just little special ways in which you had to squeeze a little bit to get everything on at the same time.” Here’s a fun fact: Betty Holberton while working on ENIAC invented the ‘breakpoint’, a method still used for debugging programs today.9
By Feb 1946, ENIAC was ready to be unveiled to the world. There were supposed to be two big demonstrations to showcase its astonishing capabilities. Unfortunately, the first demonstration turned out to be a dud! Thus, the folks in charge desperately wanted to nail the second one. After all, it was their one last chance to make a big splash. And here, dear readers, at the risk of repeating myself, let me ask: whom do you think they turned to for help?
A few days before the demonstration, Herman Goldstine invited Betty and Jean over to his apartment for tea and asked, “Could you put the trajectory on the ENIAC?”
Betty and Jean said, “Of course.”
He followed it up with, “Well, could you have it ready for the demonstration?”
And the women said, “Of course, no problem.”
"We were thrilled. It was like a dream come true." Jean recalled.10
And thus, they set out to work. Yes, they had their work cut out for them, but they knew they could make the program work. After all, these were the same women who, by now, knew the ENIAC inside out. In fact, they could debug the hardware down to a vacuum tube. Here's Jean again, “once the engineers found that we could debug the ENIAC better than they could, they let us do it gladly.”11
But the night before the demonstration, they still hadn't managed to fix one particular bug. Despite their best efforts, they just couldn't, so they decided to go home instead and tackle it the next day. The next morning, to Jean's surprise, Betty had already figured out the solution and the program was ready! Jean would proudly proclaim years later "Betty could do more logical reasoning while she was asleep than most people can do awake."12
The demonstrations were a huge success. ENIAC had calculated the trajectory of a projectile in less than 20 seconds, “everybody gasped”13. The work of weeks had been reduced to mere seconds. It was the birth of the electronic computing revolution.
And just when everything seemed alright, it wasn't quite. As Kay recalled, “None of us girls were ever introduced as any part of it”. Thousands of hours of effort went unrecognized, and it wasn't just the number of hours they put in, but what they had managed to accomplish. They were the world's first ever programmers of a modern computer. Yes, granted, “they did receive a lot of compliments” from the ENIAC team, but the world at large wouldn't come to know about their existence, let alone their triumphs, for decades to come!
“On probably no other day of my life have I experienced such thrilling highs and such depressing lows,” Jean shared. And it was that very night, that they hosted a dinner to celebrate the "unlimited scientific future of the newest technology development,” the one with cognac, cigars and men.14 The women weren't invited.
In the mid-1980s, Kathy Kleiman, an undergrad at Harvard came across a couple of old black and white photos, one of which had a close-up showing two young women standing in front of ENIAC. She looked at the caption. There were no names, just ENIAC. Perplexed she reached out to her professor and asked, "Who are [these] women?" The professor answered, "I don’t know, but I know who might.” He asked her to visit Dr. Gwen Bell, co-founder of the Computer Museum in Boston, so Kathy did. But, to her surprise, when she posed the same question to Dr. Bell, her answer left Kathy completely baffled."They’re the refrigerator ladies!" Dr. Bell said, "They are models."
For some reason, Kathy couldn't get herself to believe Dr. Bell, and she was right. They weren't refrigerator ladies or models! The women from the picture were one of the ENIAC 6. Having learned their names, Kathy eventually wrote her senior thesis on these women titled ‘Invisible Women: A Social History of Contributions of Women to Early Computer Programming.’
A few more years passed, and since 1996 was going to be the 50th anniversary of ENIAC, a year prior, Kathy decided to call up, Steve Brown, the dean of Moore school of engineering, the place where ENIAC was born and asked about the 6 women who programmed ENIAC, “Are they coming to the anniversary?” And here's his response: "Who… who are you talking about?" The women of ENIAC were not even on the invitation list of its fiftieth anniversary. Heck! The man in charge of the event, wasn't even aware of their existence.
For Kathy, that was the final straw, and ever since that conversation with the Dean, Kathy made it one of her life's missions to ensure that their stories would not fade into obscurity! She would eventually go on to preserve their oral narratives and advocate for recognition of their achievements, produce a documentary, and ultimately pen a book about these extraordinary women.
Here's Kathy in her own words from her book the Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer
Beginning of excerpt:
"Gradually news of the ENIAC Programmers began to spread. Tim Bartik, Jean’s son, nominated them in 1997 for induction into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame; later the Computer History Museum (CHM) named Jean a “fellow” alongside Bob Metcalfe [the inventor of the Ethernet] and Linus Torvalds [who famously gave us Linux] in 2008"
The next night, CHM hosted a VIP reception for Jean and then a big event, a “fireside chat,” with Linda O’Bryan, founder of National Public Radio’s Nightly Business Report.
But would anyone come? The story of the ENIAC Programmers was not well known. Brad Templeton, my friend and longtime chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I ran our own publicity campaign, informally titled “Bring Your Daughter to Meet Jean.” Brad introduced me to female bloggers of Silicon Valley, and they spread the word.
That night we held our breath, still not knowing if anyone would show up. Instead, we found ourselves in the museum’s biggest room, set up with 400 chairs, full of women programmers and engineers, some with their daughters, and some men too. Our hosts beamed—it was the youngest and most female audience the CHM had ever hosted.
We showed my trailer of the documentary (as a work in progress), and Linda O’Bryan began to interview Jean. They both sat in large, wooden, upholstered chairs on a small stage set up front. At one point, all of the lights in the room went out. When I checked later, the tech crew told me that the lights were on motion detectors. They had gone out because 400 people, hanging on Jean’s words, had stopped moving to listen closely. The crew members smiled. That had never happened before"End of excerpt.
Today, we can see the lasting legacy of Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, and Betty Holberton in the names of three of the current US Army supercomputers.15 Finally, they are getting the recognition they always deserved. Their stories needed to be told because "the omission of women from the history of computer science perpetuates misconceptions of women as uninterested or incapable in the field."16 The ratio of women to men in the field of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is already awfully skewed. Thus, if someone tries to perpetuate this absurd notion of women as uninterested or incapable, first and foremost, they ought to be educated on how the first ever professional programmers of a modern computer were women! And then one must proceed not so subtly on to the next step, which is to ask them, to go … take a effin hike!
Kleiman, K. (2022). Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer. C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd