Passage III

Programmed for Success

Today’s palm-sized computers descended from the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world’s first successful electronic computer. It was a massive machine that took up 1,800 square feet of floor space and weighed 30 tons. ENIAC was designed during World War II with the intention of helping the US military calculate precise trajectory tables that would have allowed artillery to be adjusted quickly.

A group of men designed and built ENIAC, a group of six women mathematicians, lead by Jean Jennings Bartik, programmed it. Bartik and her team figured out how to set ENIAC’s 3,000 switches and hundreds of connection cables so that it could run each calculation correctly. Programming ENIAC required enormous patience. To change a program, the women had to rewire the machine manually by manipulating punch cards and switches in a series of wiring boards. It could take as long as two days to make even a small change.

Once Bartik’s team finished a program, though, a complex calculation such that it would have taken a human several days to complete could be done by ENIAC in a fraction of a second. Therefore, the machine could instantly determine the cube root of 2,589 to the 16th power. In one second, ENIAC could discharge 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications, or 38 divisions. Such computational capacity was used not only by the military but also in many scientific fields, including weather prediction, atomic energy research, and wind-tunnel design.

[1] But all the media attention went to the machine itself and the men who designed it. [2] The introduction of ENIAC to the world in 1946 was headline news. [3] The women programmers were largely forgotten until the late 1980s, when Harvard student, Kathryn Kleiman, came across the women’s names’ in a computer-history book. [4] Kleiman filmed twenty hours of interviews with Bartik included with other surviving programmers. [5] This material finally brought attention to the ENIAC women, they were the twentieth century’s first computer programmers. (45)