The ENIAC programmers

The photograph shows two of the six original women programmers of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer:

The six original ENIAC programmers were: Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

The ENIAC was developed during World War II to help with ballistics calculations, although its main use was in computing the parameters for the first hydrogen bomb. Construction began in 1943, it was formally accepted by the U.S. Army in July 1946, and it ran continuously until 11:45 pm on October 2, 1955.

And although its inventors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, became famous, the story of this machine’s first 6 programmers was not known until many years later. It began to come to light in the second half of the 1980s, thanks to the research of Kathy Kleiman. In 1997 these six women were inducted into the hall of fame of WITI (Women In Technology International).

If you want to know more you can visit Kathy Kleiman’s site https://www.eniacprogrammers.org/