Walter Isaacson on the women of� ENIAC

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Ever since the days of Charles Babbage, who conceived of a giant mechanical calculator called theAnalytical Engine in the 1830s, the engineering of computer hardware has been dominated by men.The pioneers of software, however, were often women, beginning with Babbage's friend and museAda, Countess of Lovelace. Daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and a mother who lovedmath, Ada combined both fields into what she called "poetical science." When she saw somemechanical looms that used punched cards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it remindedher of how Babbage's engine used punched cards to make calculations, and she developed thehistoric insight that a calculator could be instructed to handle not just numbers but anything thatcould be notated in logical symbols, such as music or words or graphics or textile patterns. In otherwords, she envisioned the modern computer. She also drew up a step-by-step sequence of operationsfor programming Babbage's engine to generate a complex series known as Bernoulli numbers. Itincluded subroutines, recursive loops, and a table showing how it would feed into the computer, allof which would be familiar to any C++ coder today. It became the first published software program,earning Ada the title of "the world's first computer programmer."

A century later, when the first electronic computers were being invented, the men were stillfocusing on the hardware, and many women followed in Ada's footsteps. One was Lt. Grace Hopper,who helped program the Harvard Mark I computer in the early 1940s. Less heralded by history wasa group of six women who worked in wartime secrecy at the University of Pennsylvania, where JohnMauchly and Presper Eckert led a team that was building ENIAC, the world's first programmable,all-electronic, general-purpose computer. Here is an except from Walter Isaacson's The Innovatorstelling their story:

To listen to this excerpt as an audio book, press the "play" button below:

As ENIAC was being constructed at Penn in 1945, it was thought that it would perform a specific setof calculations over and over, such as determining a missile's trajectory using different variables.But the end of the war meant that the machine was needed for many other types of calculations--sonic waves, weather patterns, and the explosive power of atom bombs--that would require it to bereprogrammed often.

This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC's rat's nest of cables and resetting its switches. Atfirst the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which may have been whyit was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to become engineers. But what thewomen of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to understand, was that the programming ofa computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.

One of the control boards used to program ENIAC.Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

The tale of Jean Jennings is illustrative of the early women computer programmers. She was born ona farm on the outskirts of Alanthus Grove, Mo. (pop. 104), into a family that had almost no moneyand deeply valued education. Her father taught in a one-room schoolhouse, where Jean became thestar pitcher and lone girl on the softball team. Her mother, though she had dropped out of school ineighth grade, helped tutor algebra and geometry. Jean was the sixth of seven children, all of whomwent to college. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Maryville, where thetuition was $76 per year. She started out majoring in journalism, but she hated her adviser soswitched to math, which she loved.

When she finished in January 1945, her calculus teacher showed her a flier soliciting womenmathematicians to work at the University of Pennsylvania, where women were working as"computers"--humans who performed routinized math tasks--mainly calculating artillery trajectorytables for the Army. As one of the ads put it:

Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics...Women are being offered scientific and engineeringjobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science andengineering...You will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is WOMEN WANTED!

Jennings, who had never been out of Missouri, applied. When she received a telegram of acceptance,she boarded the midnight Wabash train heading east and arrived at Penn 40 hours later. "Needless

to say, they were shocked that I had gotten there so quickly," she recalled.

Jennings, left, Wescoff, center and Lichterman, work on portable function tables programmingtrigonometric functions into the room size computer.Photo: Corbis

When Jennings showed up in March 1945, at age 20, there were approximately 70 women at Pennworking on desktop adding machines and scribbling numbers on huge sheets of paper. AdeleGoldstine, a mathematician who was married to the Army's liaison with the ENIAC team, was incharge of recruiting and training. "I'll never forget the first time I saw Adele," Jennings said. "Sheambled into class with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, walked over to a table,threw one leg over its corner, and began to lecture in her slightly cleaned up Brooklyn accent." ForJennings, who had grown up as a spirited tomboy bristling at the countless instances of sexism shefaced, it was a transforming experience. "I knew I was a long way from Maryville, where women hadto sneak down to the greenhouse to grab a smoke."

A few months after she arrived, a memo was circulated among the women about six job openings towork on the mysterious machine that was behind locked doors on the first floor of Penn's MooreSchool of Engineering. "I had no idea what the job was or what the ENIAC was," Jennings recalled."All I knew was that I might be getting in on the ground floor of something new, and I believed Icould learn and do anything as well as anyone else." She also was looking to do something moreexciting than calculating trajectories.

When she got to the meeting, Herman Goldstine, Adele's husband, asked her what she knew aboutelectricity. "I said that I had had a course in physics and knew that E equaled IR," she recalled,referring to Ohm's law. "No, no," Goldstine replied, "I don't care about that, but are you afraid of it?"The job involved plugging in wires and throwing a lot of switches, he explained. She said that shewasn't afraid. While she was being interviewed, Adele Goldstine came in, looked at her, and nodded.Jennings was selected.

Jean Jennings, left, and Frances Bilas operate the main control pane of the ENIAC at Moore Schoolof Electrical Engineering in 1946Photo: US Army

In addition to Jean Jennings (later Bartik), the others were Marlyn Wescoff (later Meltzer), RuthLichterman (later Teitelbaum), Betty Snyder (later Holberton), Frances Bilas (later Spence), and KayMcNulty (who later married John Mauchly). They were a typical squad thrown together by the war:Wescoff and Lichterman were Jewish, Snyder a Quaker, McNulty an Irish-born Catholic, andJennings a lapsed Church of Christ Protestant. "We had a wonderful time with each other, mainlybecause none of us had ever been in close contact with anyone from one of the others' religions,"according to Jennings. "We had some great arguments about religious truths and beliefs. Despite ourdifferences, or perhaps because of them, we really liked one another."

In the summer of 1945, the six women were sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground to learn how to useIBM punch cards and wire up plug boards. Jennings became a ringleader: "We worked together,lived together, ate together, and sat up until all hours discussing everything." Since they were allsingle and surrounded by a lot of single soldiers, there were multiple memorable romances andaffairs nurtured over Tom Collins cocktails in the booths of the officers' club. Wescoff found aMarine who was "tall and quite handsome." Jennings paired up with an Army sergeant named Pete,who was "attractive but not really handsome." He was from Mississippi, and Jennings was outspokenin her opposition to racial segregation: "Pete told me once that he would never take me to Biloxibecause I was so outspoken in my views on discrimination that I'd be killed."

A close up view of the components on the ENIAC at the Army's Aberdeen proving grounds in1947.Photo: Jerry Cooke--Corbis

After six weeks of training, the women consigned their boyfriends to memory archives and returnedto Penn, where they were given poster-size diagrams and charts describing ENIAC. "Somebody gaveus a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said,'Here, figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program it,'" explainedMcNulty. That required analyzing the differential equations and then determining how to patch thecables to connect to the correct electronic circuits. "The biggest advantage of learning the ENIACfrom the diagrams was that we began to understand what it could and could not do," said Jennings."As a result we could diagnose troubles almost down to the individual vacuum tube." She and Snyderdevised a system to figure out which of the 18,000 vacuum tubes had burned out. "Since we knewboth the application and the machine, we learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than,the engineers. I tell you, those engineers loved it. They could leave the debugging to us."

Snyder described making careful diagrams and charts for each new configuration of cables andswitches. "What we were doing then was the beginning of a program," she said, though they did notyet have that word for it. They wrote out each new sequence on paper to protect themselves. "We allfelt that we'd be scalped if we ruined the board," said Jennings.

One day Jennings and Snyder were sitting in the second-floor classroom they had commandeered,staring at rolled-out sheets containing the diagrams of ENIAC's many units, when a man came in toinspect some construction. "Hi, my name is John Mauchly," he said. "I was just checking to see if the

ceiling's falling in." Neither woman had met the ENIAC visionary before, but they were not the leastbit shy or intimidated. "Boy, are we glad to see you," Jennings declared. "Tell us how this blastedaccumulator works." Mauchly carefully answered the question and then others. When they finished,he told them, "Well, my office is next door. So anytime I'm in my office, you can come in and ask mequestions."

Almost every afternoon, they did. "He was a marvelous teacher," according to Jennings. He pushedthe women to envision the many things ENIAC might someday do, in addition to calculating artillerytrajectories. He knew that in order to make it a true general-purpose computer, it would need toinspire programmers who could coax various tasks out of the hardware. "He used to always try toget us to think of other problems," said Jennings. "He would always want us to invert a matrix orsomething like that."

"The biggest advantage of learning the ENIAC from the diagrams was that we began to understandwhat it could and could not do. As a result we could diagnose troubles almost down to the individualvacuum tube."

Around the same time that Grace Hopper was doing so at Harvard, the women of ENIAC weredeveloping the use of subroutines. They were fretting that the logical circuits did not have enoughcapacity to compute some trajectories. It was McNulty who pushed a solution. "Oh, I know, I know, Iknow," she said excitedly one day. "We can use a master programmer to repeat code." They tried itand it worked. "We began to think about how we could have subroutines, and nested subroutines,and all that stuff," recalled Jennings. "It was very practical in terms of doing this trajectory problem,because the idea of not having to repeat a whole program, you could just repeat pieces of it and setup the master programmer to do this. Once you've learned that, you learn how to design yourprogram in modules. Modularizing and developing subroutines were really crucial in learning how toprogram."

Because it was being used for atom bomb calculations and other classified tasks, ENIAC was keptsecret until February 1946, when the Army and Penn scheduled a gala unveiling for the public andthe press. Herman Goldstine decided that the centerpiece of the ENIAC presentation would be ademonstration of a missile trajectory calculation. So two weeks in advance, he invited Jean Jenningsand Betty Snyder to his apartment and, as Adele served tea, asked them if they could programENIAC to do this in time. "We sure could," Jennings pledged. She was excited. It would allow them toget their hands directly on the machine, which was rare. They set to work plugging memory busesinto the correct units and setting up program trays.

The men knew that the success of their demonstration was in the hands of these two women.Mauchly came by one Saturday with a bottle of apricot brandy to keep them fortified. "It wasdelicious," Jennings recalled. "From that day forward, I always kept a bottle of apricot brandy in mycupboard." A few days later, the dean of the engineering school brought them a paper bagcontaining a fifth of whiskey. "Keep up the good work," he told them. Snyder and Jennings were notbig drinkers, but the gifts served their purpose. "It impressed us with the importance of thisdemonstration," said Jennings.

The night before the demonstration was Valentine's Day, but despite their normally active sociallives, Snyder and Jennings did not celebrate. "Instead, we were holed up with that wonderfulmachine, the ENIAC, busily making the last corrections and checks on the program," Jenningsrecounted. There was one stubborn glitch they couldn't figure out: The program did a wonderful jobspewing out data on the trajectory of artillery shells, but it just didn't know when to stop. Even afterthe shell would have hit the ground, the program kept calculating its trajectory, "like a hypothetical

shell burrowing through the ground at the same rate it had traveled through the air," as Jenningsdescribed it. "Unless we solved that problem, we knew the demonstration would be a dud, and theENIAC's inventors and engineers would be embarrassed."

The machine that prints and tabulates the answers to the problems solved by the ENIAC,1946.Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

Jennings and Snyder worked late into the evening before the press briefing trying to fix it, but theycouldn't. They finally gave up at midnight, when Snyder needed to catch the last train to hersuburban apartment. But after she went to bed, Snyder figured it out: "I woke up in the middle ofthe night thinking what that error was...I came in, made a special trip on the early train thatmorning to look at a certain wire." The problem was that there was a setting at the end of a "doloop" that was one digit off. She flipped the requisite switch and the glitch was fixed. "Betty could domore logical reasoning while she was asleep than most people can do awake," Jennings latermarveled. "While she slept, her subconscious untangled the knot that her conscious mind had beenunable to."

At the demonstration, ENIAC was able to spew out in 15 seconds a set of missile trajectorycalculations that would have taken human computers several weeks. Mauchly and Eckert, like goodinnovators, knew how to put on a show. The tips of the vacuum tubes in the ENIAC accumulators,which were arranged in 10-by-10 grids, poked through holes in the machine's front panel. But thefaint light from the neon bulbs, which served as indicator lights, was barely visible. So Eckert gotPing-Pong balls, cut them in half, wrote numbers on them, and placed them over the bulbs. As thecomputer began processing the data, the lights in the room were turned off so that the audience

would be awed by the blinking Ping-Pong balls, a spectacle that became a staple of movies and TVshows. "As the trajectory was being calculated, numbers built up in the accumulators and weretransferred from place to place, and the lights started flashing like the bulbs on the marquees in LasVegas," said Jennings. "We had done what we set out to do. We had programmed the ENIAC."

Codesigners John Mauchly (left) and Presper Eckert with ENIAC in 1966. The team put Ping-Pongballs on the bulbs as the computer began processing the data, the audience would be awed by theblinking Ping-Pong balls, a spectacle that became a staple of movies and TV shows.Photo: HultonArchive/Getty Images

The unveiling of ENIAC made the front page of the New York Times under the headlineELECTRONIC COMPUTER FLASHES ANSWERS, MAY SPEED ENGINEERING. The story began,"One of the war's top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first timeto mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced heretonight by the War Department." The report continued inside the Times for a full page, with picturesof Mauchly, Eckert, and the room-size ENIAC. Mauchly proclaimed that the machine would lead tobetter weather predictions (his original passion), airplane design, and "projectiles operating atsupersonic speeds." The Associated Press story reported an even grander vision, declaring, "Therobot opened the mathematical way to better living for every man." As an example of "better living,"Mauchly asserted that computers might one day serve to lower the cost of a loaf of bread. How thatwould happen he did not explain, but it and millions of other such ramifications did in fact eventually

transpire.

Later Jennings complained, in the tradition of Ada Lovelace, that many of the newspaper reportsoverstated what ENIAC could do by calling it a "giant brain" and implying that it could think. "TheENIAC wasn't a brain in any sense," she insisted. "It couldn't reason, as computers still cannotreason, but it could give people more data to use in reasoning."

Jennings had another complaint that was more personal: "Betty and I were ignored and forgottenfollowing the demonstration. We felt as if we had been playing parts in a fascinating movie thatsuddenly took a bad turn, in which we had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce somethingreally spectacular and then were written out of the script." That night there was a candlelit dinner atPenn's venerable Houston Hall. It was filled with scientific luminaries, military brass, and most ofthe men who had worked on ENIAC. But Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were not there, nor wereany of the other women programmers. "Betty and I weren't invited," Jennings said, "so we were sortof horrified." While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their wayhome alone through a very cold February night.

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Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all theprogrammers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: "Despite our coming ofage in an era when women's career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiatethe era of the computer." It happened because a lot of women back then had studied math, and theirskills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: The boys with their toys thought thatassembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a man's job. "American science andengineering was even more sexist than it is today," Jennings said. "If the ENIAC's administrators hadknown how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and howcomplex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role towomen."

This story is from the October 6, 2014 issue of Fortune. The excerpt draws on: Jean Jennings Bartik,Pioneer Programmer (Truman State, http://tsup.truman.edu/item.asp?itemid=480); Jean Bartik oralhistory , conducted by Gardner Hendrie, Computer History Museum, July 1, 2008; Jean Bartik oralhistory, conducted by Janet Abbate, IEEE Global History Network, Aug. 3, 2001; Steve Lohr, "JeanBartik, Software Pioneer, Dies at 86," New York Times, Apr. 7, 2011; Jennifer Light, "WhenComputers were Women," Technology and Culture, July 1999. See also LeAnn Erickson, "Top SecretRosies: The Female Computers of WWII" (Video, PBS, 2002); Thomas Petzinger Jr., "History ofSoftware Begins with Work of Some Brainy Woman," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 1996; KathyKleiman, The Computers, documentary, ENIAC Programmers Project, http://eniacprogrammers.org/.