Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
yet few would have predicted how rapidly the commercial market for
computers would expand over the course of the next decade.
“Glorifi ed Clerical Workers”
The low priority given to programming was refl ected in who was assigned
to the task. Although the ENIAC was developed by academic researchers
at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering,
it was commissioned and funded by the Ballistics Research Laboratory
(BRL) of the U.S. Army. Located at the nearby Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
the BRL was responsible for the development of the complex fi ring tables
required to accurately target long-range ballistic weaponry. Hundreds of
these tables were required to account for the infl uence of highly variable
atmospheric conditions (air density, temperature, etc.) on the trajectory
of shells and bombs. Prior to the arrival of electronic computers, these
tables were calculated and compiled by teams of human “computers”
working eight-hour shifts, six days a week. From 1943 onward, essen-
tially all of these computers were women, as were their immediate super-
visors. The more senior women (those with college-level mathematical
training) were responsible for developing the elaborate “plans of compu-
tation” that were carried out by their fellow computers.
In June 1945, six of the best human computers at Aberdeen were hired
by the leaders of the top secret “Project X”—the U.S. Army's code name
for the ENIAC project—to set up the ENIAC machine to produce bal-
listics tables. Their names were Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Betty
Jean Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, Ruth Lichterman, and
Marlyn Wescoff. Collectively they were known as “the ENIAC girls.”
16
Today the ENIAC girls are often considered the fi rst computer program-
mers. In the 1940s, they were simply called coders.
The use of the word coder in this context is signifi cant. At this point
in time the concept of a program, or of a programmer, had not yet been
introduced into computing. Since electronic computing was then envi-
sioned by the ENIAC developers as “nothing more than an automated
form of hand computation,” it seemed natural to assume that the primary
role of the women of the ENIAC would be to develop the plans of com-
putation that the electronic version of the human computer would
follow.
17
In other words, they would code into machine language the
higher-level mathematics developed by male scientists and engineers.
Coding implied manual labor, and mechanical translation or rote tran-
scription; coders were obviously low on the intellectual and professional
