Misunderstandings of the Past

People ask why I research computer history. With so many Internet laws and policies to work on, why delve back into the old technologies of the 1940s? The reason why is that past is prologue and early programming pioneers and their innovations may provide insight into our dilemmas today. Our STEM problems of low percentages of women and minorities entering computer science may lay in a misunderstanding of the past.

In twenty years of research of the ENIAC Programmers, I learned two things. First, that women (and men) engaged in incredible acts of computing innovation during and just after WWII, and this work established the foundation of modern computing and programming. Second, some historians oppose the telling of a more complete computing history and seem determined to maintain an “all white, all male” view of history. But that is not what the past shows us.

Innovation drives need and need drives invention. The great ENIAC computer is one great example – the world’s first modern computer (all-electronic, programmable, general-purpose) commissioned in 1942 during the dark days of WWII.  The story is one that shows us a fascinating and diverse group of inventors.

At the start of US entrance into WWII, the Army’s Ballistics Research Labs realized it need large numbers of ballistic trajectory calculations. Gunners needed to know what angle to shoot their artillery to hit a target 8 to 10 miles away.  A special differential calculus equation could provide the answer – and the angle – by computing it required a person who knew differential calculus (a rare skill in those days). No electro-mechanical machines could do it alone. 

In 1942, BRL relocated to Philadelphia and the halls of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering (University of Pennsylvania). BRL located women math graduates from schools nearby, including Drexel University, Temple University and Chestnut Hill College. Ultimately, the Computing Project expanded to almost 100 women. To fill its ranks, the Army reached up to New York and out to Missouri. Brilliant women “Computers” worked day and night, six days a week, calculating thousands of ballistics trajectories which were compiled into artillery firing tables and sent to soldiers in the battlefields. It was a tremendous effort.   

Second, the Army and BRL agreed to commission a highly-experimental machine, the first modern computer, to speed up trajectory calculations. Called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer and nicknamed “ENIAC,” the computer would calculate ballistics trajectories in seconds, instead of days, but only if co-inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert could get the new machine to work, including its 18,000 vacuum tubes. Key technologists of the time, of course, told the Army that the ENIAC would never work.  But in the dark days of the war with new artillery being manufactured and a growing need for firing tables, ENIAC was a risk the Army was willing to take.  

Mauchly and Eckert brought a group of young engineers – American, Chinese, even albino – to build ENIAC’s 40 units. As ENIAC neared completion of construction, BRL’s Lieutenant Herman Goldstine selected six women from the Computing Project to program the ENIAC. They were Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Betty Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence.

To say the women’s programming job was difficult is an understatement. ENIAC had no technical or operating manuals (they would be written the following summer) and no programming codes (written for the next computer by ENIAC Programmer Betty Holberton a few years later for UNIVAC, the first commercial computer). The women studied ENIAC’s wiring and logical diagrams and taught themselves how to program it. Then they sat down and figured out to break down the differential calculus ballistics trajectory program into the small, discrete steps the computer can handle – just as programmers do today. 

Then they figured out how to program their steps onto the computer – via a “direct programming” interface of hundreds of cables and 3000 switches. It is a bit like modern programming adding cartwheels and backflips. The women created flowcharts to capture every logical step of the trajectory equation and every physical one too: every switch, every cable, ever setting. With the “old Army spirit,” they did a task no one had done before. Tom Petzinger, Jr., celebrated their work in his Wall Street Journal article, The History of Software Begins with Brainy Women’s Work (Nov. 15, 1996).

On February 15, 1946, the ENIAC went from top secret status to front page news.  Heralded by The York Times, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and Boston Globe, the world learned technology had taken a giant step forward. The same day the Moore School ran a demonstration for Army officers and leading technologists which featured the women’s ballistics trajectory. Their program ran flawlessly and indeed calculated the ballistics trajectory in only a few seconds. 

After the war, the Army asked all six ENIAC Programmers to continue their work – no solider returning home from the battlefield could program ENIAC. BRL needed the ENIAC Programmers to teach the next generation of ENIAC programmers, and some did. Others made other pivotal contributions: Jean Bartik led the team that converted ENIAC to one of the world’s first stored program computer and her best friend Betty Holberton joined Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and wrote critical new programming tools for UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer, including the C-10 instruction code (predecessor to programming languages). 

Alas, over half a century after their work, a small group of historians sees fit to disparage the ENIAC Programmers.  In his 2010 book, The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan Ensmenger devoted an entire section to “Glorified Clerical Workers” and heaped personal insults on these hard-working WWII civilian employees. Despite honors from IEEE Computer Society, Computer History Museum and Women in Technology International received by the women at the time of publication, Ensmenger wrote: 

• “The low priority given to the programming [of ENIAC] was reflected in who was assigned to the task. [p. 35],
• “coders were obviously low on the intellectual and professional status hierarchy.” [pp.35-36], and  
• the use of the word software in this context is, of course, anachronistic – the distinctions and the gender connotations it embodies – between “hard” technical mastery, and the “software,” more social (and implicitly, of secondary importance) aspects of computer work – are applicable even in the earliest of electronic computing development projects.” [p. 14]

As a friend of the ENIAC Programmers and recorder of their oral histories, I can picture hear Jean Jennings Bartik’s response – and hearty belly laugh and the reminder that “the engineers treated us with a great deal of respect.” The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, documentary at www.eniacprogrammers.org).

The historians’ misunderstanding appears to originate in the women’s Army classified of “subprofessional” (despite their college degrees). Yet, we know from Bletchley Park and Code Girls’ stories of women cryptographies that women in top secret wartime roles hid in plain sgith — often behind titles of “secretary” and “clerk.” Why not evaluate the women by the depth of their education, the quality of their work, and the extent of their innovation? 

The negative language of the critique of the ENIAC Programmers, as is the book’s cover art, a picture of a lone white man standing before a huge mainframe computer.  Overall, the book sends a clear message: girls do not look to computer science for education or jobs.

We can do better. I talk to groups of young technologists around the world and share the story of the ENIAC Team – women and men who worked together and changed the world. The audiences light up. Knowing pioneers of computing and programming came from different races and backgrounds is exciting and inspiring. Our computing history is rich and inclusive – so why not share it? In the future, I hope we will and thank Princeton for the times we shared my documentary, The Computers.The discussions afterwards were priceless!