In my last session of women's history i presented at the library it was sub-titled "women scientists" and the last half was about women "computers". That's what they were called, just as the women who were hired to demonstrate the new-fangled thing called the typewriter were called "typewriters".
You may have been seeing stories about Ada Byron Lovelace over the last decade. She's been rediscovered from the 1850s. She was the first computer programmer. She never actually programmed a computer, but wrote a critique on Babbage's "difference engine" which he invented to do long calculations. She had the vision that with the right algorythmns it could be used for all kinds of things including composing music. She said anything that could be configured into numbers (alphabet, music, etc) could be "computerized" not just to be calculated, making software as important as the hardware. Even Walter Isaacson in his new book "The Innovators" calls her the first computer programmer.
During WWII, the Army had many new ballistic weapons and needed to provide a the logistics of trajectory for each one. It took about 30 hrs for all the trajectories of each cannon to be determined on calculators and there were thousands, so they put out a call for all mathematicians. Many men were already on projects so they recruited women. It was still too slow, so in 1945 2 men at the Univ of Pa were tasked to build a computer that would do the job. When they had it build, it was called ENIAC and was 80 ft long and 8 ft tall and was not programmed.
https://www.google.com/search?q=eniac+pictures&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=RxJ-GhtPTG5vKM%3A6 women volunteered to program it. They started from scratch - no one knew how to program it. They had no books, no training, no direction, just the schematics and the machine. THEY DID IT and when they finished it took a couple seconds instead of 30 hrs to make a table of trajectory for a weapon.
When the govt started telling women to go home to make room for men, no men knew how to program the ENIAC. The Army begged this six women to stay on the job. They were the first professional "comouters", the first computer technicians, the first instructors of what to do with the ENIAC and modern computing and the inventors of the tools that paved the way for modern software.
2 of them teamed up with Grace Hopper after the war and developed the commercial computer UNIVAC. Grace Hopper developed the language COBOL which used words, not numbers in programming, leading straight to you being able to say "Seri, what is..........."
When the Army had the p r extravaganza introducing ENIAC, the programmers- all women, were not introduced!!! They had their pictures taken with ENIAC as you can see in the link, but people assumed they were models, making ENIAC look good, the way they placed models in appliance ads and people actually calked them "refrigerator ladies." They were not invited to the dinner that all the guys in the dept went to that night to celebrate!!! AND they were not invited to the 50th anniversary of ENIAC at the U of Pa in 1995.
Another "men afraid of women's success" story.
Kathy Kleiman, a computer student at Harvard heard this story and went looking for their story and made a documentary about them.
http://eniacprogrammers.orgSo in the future when you think of computer programmers, i hope you think of women FIRST and then men.
Also in that presentation I talked about Sally Ride who got asked questions like "will being in space effect your reproductive organs?" And "do you cry when things go wrong at work?" And "how do you feel about being with all these men?" (I think there were all of 5 men) And of course Phyllis Schafly was concerned about separate bathroom facilities! 😜
So, yes, we can fill 1000 pages with stupid ideas about women!
Excuse any mistyped words, this was a long one.
Jean
