People essaykl

The Invisible Women Programmers ENIAC

Katherine Loughlin Summer 2016 Essay 1 - People IXDS 5403 - Media History and Theory Professor David Edwin Meyers MA Interactive Design Lindsey Wilson College

That Important Night It was 6:30 pm on Friday, February 15, 1946 on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The formal dedication and demonstration of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) (Project X) happened throughout the day and now it was time to celebrate.

Army officials, University of Pennsylvania officials, select scientists and people who worked on the ENIAC were gathered at Hunter Hall on the campus for a candlelit dinner… well, except the two important women who were the programmers of the trajectory problem that was used as the necessary proof, for the Army acceptance of the ENIAC. During the demonstration event at Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the six women programmers were asked to be hostesses to greet all the important guests and show them around. They also ran the tabulator to print up the sheets that were the output of the demonstrations and hand them out to the attendees as a souvenir.

The exclusion from the dinner is especially important and reflects the time in history for the role of women in math, computing and yes, programming.

“Like every other American woman, the ENIAC women played the role society had assigned to us and we played it well and generally without rancor, although not without some hurt feelings.” Jean Jennings Bartik

February 15, 1946 Invitation to dinner after the public demonstration.

2

Who Were the Women Programmers We really did not learn of the existence of the six women programmers and the contributions they made to computing until about 40 years after that successful demonstration in 1946.

Uncovering them was credited to Kathy Kleiman, a computer science undergraduate at Harvard in 1986 (the ENIAC 40th anniversary), who started the process for their recognition.

She was looking back in history to find mentors in her field and found the publicity pictures showing them wiring the ENIAC. They were known as the “refrigerator women� or more simply, models. This started the surviving six programmers down a road of accolades and finally recognition for the contribution they made to the history of computing.

"The Refrigerator Girls" with vacuum tubes from ENIAC.

Even for the 50th Anniversary in 1996, most of the programmers were not invited to the event, except for Kay. She had been married John Mauchly and so she was recognized as the widow of a scientist.

Kathy Kleiman has made it her mission to ensure they were remembered and created a documentary and organization dedicated to these women to help encourage young women interested in programming and to show that women played a vital role in the history of computing.

3

Before we learn about the women, let’s cover some important points.

Let’s begin in December 1942 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, one of the things that happened as a result was a need by the Army to properly calculate ballistics trajectories on all the new weaponry. Since most men were sent off to war, like other wartime needs, women were called up to help and in this cast to compute the information necessary for the firing table. This information was needed by the soldier in the field. The people that performed this calculation were called computers.

By the way, what is a human computer?

From 1943 onward, all these computers were women, as were their immediate supervisors. The more senior women (those with college-level math training) were responsible for developing the elaborate plans of computation that were carried out by their fellow computers. They used desktop adding machines or the differential analyzer to calculate ballistics trajectories. The differential calculus equations took about 30+ hours to complete by hand using an adding machine and it took a computer about 40 hours to calculate a single trajectory and the Army needed thousands of them. A firing table for each gun with maybe 1800 simple trajectories was labor intensive and time consuming. For this reason, there were 100 women working as human computers performing the ballistics computations.

All of the six women programmers started out as computers and it was from this pool they were selected to work on the ENIAC.

Example of a trajectory and firing table.

Example of a differnential calculus equation to calculate the trajectory.

4

Wasn’t there an alternative to hand calculations? Yes, it was called the Differential Analyzer?

The Differential Analyzer at the Moore School was an analog computer invented by Vannavar Bush at MIT, which used gears and shafts to represent the numbers used to calculate trajectories. Because of the war, it was requisitioned by Aberdeen to do these trajectories. It could calculate a trajectory in about 3/4 of an hour to within 5% accuracy. It took about 3 to 4 days to set it up with the various conditions for each new gun. It was being run by army personnel with the technical supervision and assistance from Moore School personnel.

The hand calculations were more accurate than the Analyzer, so at least one hand calculated trajectory was done before the Analyzer was set up for a new gun. The setup of the Analyzer was done to mirror as much as possible the hand calculation for the first trajectory. Over time, the gears and settings would drift somewhat. The engineers were always working to improve the machine’s accuracy.

Kay McNulty and others using the Differential Analyzer.

5

How did the women start as computers?

There was advertisement for math majors originally around the Philadelphia area, then New York City, then out west for the women computers who could compute equations using mechanical desktop calculators.

“Math Majors needed to work at the University of Pennsylvania for the Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground.”

The ad in part said, “The need for women engineers and scientists is growing both in industry and in government… Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering… you will find the slogan there as elsewhere is WOMEN WANTED!” “If they could calculate a differential calculus equation, they were hired.

Male mathematicians were already working on other projects, so the Army specifically recruited women, even hiring ones who hadn’t graduated college yet. Like everything else during early WWII, where they needed lots of people, like in factories and farms, they hired women. At the height of the program, the Army employed more than 100 women computers calculating firing tables for rockets and artillery shells.” Kathy Kleiman

What shifts did they work and what did they get paid and what was their title?

The Job Title Computer was a sub-professional rating (SP-6) with an income in 1942 of $1620/year + extra for Saturdays, which increased to $2000/year + $400 for Saturdays by 1945 when Jean Jennings was offered the position. At the time women were not given professional ratings. Male math majors were given professional ratings, but they did receive the same pay as the women doing the same job, but there were only a few men.

How did they originally get the job working on the ENIAC? In 1945, the U.S. Army (Ballistics Research Lab at Moore School of Electrical Engineering) recruited most of the six women working as computers at the University of Pennsylvania to work on a secret government project – Project X. Jean Jennings had only been at Moore School for only a few months, much less time than the others. She was one of 13 applicants for the second alternate opening. The two women ahead of her did not accept the position which paved the way for Jean to be the last of the six women selected.

6

What was the job description for the work on the ENIAC? Initially the job description called for them to set switches and plug in cables to represent the problem being calculated. The designers and planners of the ENIAC thought that mathematicians would design the setup for their own problems and the women would just setup the hardware of the ENIAC and run the problem.

It quickly became clear that planning the program setup was too complicated to learn easily and the mathematicians did not have the time or the inclination to do so.

For the next year, they used their initiative, tenacity and strong backgrounds in mathematics to become the original programmers of ENIAC.

Jean Jennings and Marlyn Wescoff programming the ENIAC.

Jean Jennings, Marlyn Wescoff and Ruth Lichterman programming the ENIAC.

Ruth Lichterman and Marln Wescott programming the ENIAC.

7

Ok, let’s learn about the six women programmers who programmed the ENIAC Betty Jean Jennings Jean was raised on a farm in rural Missouri, the 6th of 7 children, who was educated in one-room school and excelled at math. In 1945 she graduated from Northwest Missouri State Teachers' College with a degree in Mathematics. Jean did not want to become a math teacher, rather she wanted adventure. In March 1945, 20 year-old Jean arrived at the University of Pennsylvania to take a job as a computer. Jean was responsible for administering the Master Programmer central program of the ENIAC along with Betty. She was the last of the ENIAC programmers to arrive at Moore and one of the youngest.

March 1945 - Come to Work at Moore School

Betty Jean Jennings

March 1945 - Employee Information

8

Betty Snyder Betty was from Philadelphia and graduated from University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English & Journalism, but she loved math.

Both Betty Snyder was discouraged from pursuing a math career and college all together by one of her professors.

She started working as computer in 1942 when she was 25 and had been on special assignments, such as computing trajectories at extremely low temperatures. Betty and Jean were responsible for administering the Master Programmer central program of the ENIAC. Betty Snyder Frances Bilas Frances was from Philadelphia and graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women with a degree in Mathematics and minor in Physics. She started working as computer in the computing unit at the University of Pennsylvania in July 1942 along with a college classmate Kay McNulty. She was 20.

Frances Bilas

9

Kay McNulty Kay was from Philadelphia and graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women with a degree in Mathematics. She started working as computer in the computing unit at the University of Pennsylvania in July 1942 along with a college classmate Frances Bilas. She was 22.

By the time Kay was involved with the ENIAC project, she had run the differential analyzer for 4 years and had experience in cranking shafts and setting gears.

Kay McNulty Marlyn Wescoff In May of 1942, Marlyn was just completing a degree in Mathematics Education and minor in business machines from Temple University in Philadelphia. During the summer of ’42 she learned that a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was interviewing women to do weather calculations and by fall 1942, she became part of a group of human computers working under the direction of Dr. John Mauchly and his wife Mary. She was known for basically never making a mistake with her calculations.

.

Marlyn Wescoff 10

Ruth Lichterman Ruth grew up in New York City and graduated from Hunter College with a degree in Mathematics. She had been recruited to become a computer computing unit at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ruth Lichterman Where Did This Take Place Like much of scientific research and development during WWII, the ENIAC was the result of the wartime alliance between a university (University of Pennsylvania) and the U.S. Armed Forces (Ballistics Research Lab – Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland).

From June to August 1945, the six women went to Aberdeen to learn the punch card equipment, input/output and the printer – punch card reader, punch and tabulator. These would all be important to know with the ENIAC.

Moore School of Electrical Engineering University of Pennsylvania

11

Deep Dive into the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) – The world's first electronic general-purpose computer.

ENIAC was developed at the University of Pennsylvania, Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It was commissioned and funded by the Ballistics Research Library (BRL) of the U. S. Army. Located near Aberdeen the lab was responsible for the development of complex firing tables required to accurately target long-range ballistic weaponry.

Hundreds of these tables were required to account for the influence of highly variable atmospheric conditions – air density, temp, etc…) on the trajectory of shells and bombs.

The calculations were not coming out fast enough so the U.S. Army funded an experimental project to calculate the trajectories faster – Project X. ENIAC was programmed by plugging wires in from place to place and it had switches to set the functions. Changing a problem was a matter of removing wires from the prior configuration and putting them back in a new configuration and testing to see if it worked. This might take days if it was a complicated program.

The idea of a subroutine was original with ENIAC and the same subroutine could be run without any mechanical input. The idea of using internal memory was also original with ENIAC.

Betty Snyder and ENIAC

The ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions or subtractions or 360 multiplications of two 10-digit decimal numbers in a second. In the same space of time, it could call up 1,000 values of a function from function tables that were included. Problems that would have taken months of simple hand calculation and hours, even days, with the help of the differential analyzer could now be dispatched in seconds. The ballistic calculations went from taking 30 hours to complete by hand to taking mere seconds to complete on the ENIAC.

12

ENIAC took up an entire room and consisted of refrigerator-sized panels fitted with 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and about 5 million hand-soldered joints. It cost about $500,000 to build (about $6 million today).

The ENIAC consisted of 40 separate units: initiating unit, cycling unit, master programmer (two panels), three function tables (two panels each), 20 accumulators, divider and square rooter, three multipliers, constant transmitter (three panels), and a printer (three panels). In addition, the ENIAC used three portable function tables, an IBM card reader, and an IBM summary punch.

The only input and output the ENIAC had was a punch card reader and a punch card punch. So any information came in as these holes on a card, encoding decimal numbers. It needed to work together with a sorter, a collator, a punch, and a tabulator, existing kinds of punch card machines, to do anything useful.

Jean Jennings and Frances Bias, control pane of ENIAC.

13

Key things about the ENIAC - Own dedicated power lines - Room was air cooled to keep the vacuum tubes from overheating - 18,000 vacuum tubes - 80 feet long covering three walls.

- The fourth wall was covered with its power supplies - Weighted 30 tons - 9 feet tall - 40 panels each 2ft wide and 1 foot deep - 20 Accumulators ( basically these were electronic adding machines responsible for taking numbers in and performing part of a calculation.)

- Multiplier - Divider/square rooter - Three function tables – rolling islands (each had 1200 ten-way switches used for entering tables of numbers) - Master programmer - Card reader – electromagnetic IBM punch card reader for input and - IBM card punch machine for data output - Card punch - electromagnetic - Cycling units - All electric computer - Program trays and digit trays 8ft long, contain 11 wires + ground and have 12 point terminals at each end

18,000 vacuum tubes

Jean Jennings, Marlyn Wescoff and Ruth Lichterman programming the three function tables.

14

How was ENIAC programmed – What made this a complex job for the programmers.

To program the ENIAC, the women had to physically hand-wired the machine, using switches, cables and digit trays to route data and program pulses - ‘debugging’ a program meant climbing inside the ENIAC in search of faulty connections. There were also a lot of steps that required the women to physically work the punch cards, to sort decks, to add some cards, remove some cards, run them through, tabulate them, get them ready, put them back in for the next step.

A new program had to first be sketched out on paper, then implement with extreme precision. Setting up a single calculation could take days, and a full program could take weeks.

The women received the logical block diagrams and wiring diagrams and were told to figure out how the machine works and how to program it. They studied the machine’s circuitry, logic, physical structure and operation in order to be able to better understand it and asked the design engineers lots of questions. They designed the flowcharts and format for planning the programs that ran on the ENIAC. Ruth Lichterman and Marlyn Wescoff were given the job of manually calculating a trajectory exactly how ENIAC would do it. This was used to help validate the programming of the ENIAC. Betty and Jean were responsible for administering the Master Programmer central program of the ENIAC and were responsible to the trajectory program used in the public demonstration.

In August 1945 after they return from Aberdeen training to learn the punch card equipment, Kay and Fran were assigned to help Nick Metropolis and Stan Frankel who has arrived from Los Alamos to put their problem on the ENIAC. “These women were hired to set up ENIAC, but really no one knew how to program it. There were no 'programmers' at that time, and the only thing that existed for ENIAC was the schematic. These six women found out what it took to run this computer — and they really did incredible things.” Mitch Marcus, the RCA Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

“To perform a multistep calculation, the 20 accumulators had to be wired up with large cables and trays used to carry perfectly-timed pulses from one accumulator to another. This made programming the ENIAC a complicated exercise. The feat was made even more challenging by the fact that no one in the world had ever done anything quite like this before.” Mitch Marcus “They stepped in to do a job that they didn't understand, that nobody understood. So they had to invent, discover, and learn how to work this machine without any real training. In that sense, they were real trailblazers.” Bill Mauchly (son of John and Kay Mauchly)

15

“There was no language, no operating system, no anything. The women had to figure out what the computer was, how to interface with it, and then break down a complicated mathematical problem into very small steps that the ENIAC could then perform. They physically hand-wired the machine, an arduous task using switches, cables, and digit trays to route data and program pulses.� Klieman

Block diagram of ENIAC. 16

Who designed the ENIAC John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were the hardware engineers for the ENIAC. Eckert, 22, had just graduated from Moore School and had stayed on as an electronics lab instructor while beginning work on his master’s degree and was a genius in vacuum tube circuitry.

John Mauchly, was 34, had a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University and had just completed eight years as head of the Physics Department at Ursinus College.

In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took a course called Emergency Science and Management Defense Training at Moore. The laboratory instructor was Pres Eckert. This is how the collaboration began for ENIAC.

Presper Eckert

John Mauchly 17

Who Were the Women who helped design and build the ENIAC According to the Project PX-2 payrolls between 1944 - 1945, almost 50 women who were involved in the building of ENIAC. They were wiremen, technicians, assemblers, secretaries and draftswomen.

Timeline of Events FDR declared a national emergency and the BRL commandeered the Moore School’s differential analyzer and began to move some its work to the university.

Bombing of Pearl Harbor

John Mauchly proposed an electronic version of the Bush differential analyzer for the Army (proposal lead to the ENIAC)

ENIAC negotiations, contract signed to build ENIAC

Detailed plans, prototype and construction begins June 1945 the women went to Aberdeen for three months training – ENIAC finished and debugged (Nov – 2 months after the end of the war) 200,000 man hours to build

Multiple Milestones

18

Feb 1 ENIAC Demo to the Press – Original Press Conference for reporters was Feb 1, 1946 – The women were not invited to participate. Male technicians ran the demonstration with Eckert, Mauchly, and others which included five simple math problems which were test programs.

Why Were the Women Not Recognized

Feb 2 Betty and Jean were asked if they were ready so that the Public Demo of the ENIAC on the 15th would have more of a splash.

They had a little less than 2 weeks to program the ENIAC to calculate the trajectory of a shell fired from an artillery gun –They still had a problem with the program as of 11 pm 2/14, but Betty came in the next morning and knew exactly what switch to change… a few hours before the demonstration.

The programmers' accomplishments and vast knowledge of the machine wasn't recognized at the time due to a stigma that existed about women not belonging in a mathematics environment outside of the “clerical” human computer work. The six women were largely responsible for working the mathematical equations and programming functions. Because these jobs were considered an extension of clerical work, they were filled by women, as was the practice of the day.

Feb 15 Public Demo of ENIAC

The women were viewed as operators of the ENIAC. What they really did was show the men how to use the computer, but their role was diminished and they were forgotten when the credits were handed out.

Before World War II, women with college degrees in mathematics generally taught primary or secondary school. Occasionally they worked in clerical services as statistical clerks or human computers.

Women did relatively well in mathematics, particularly in applied mathematics, which not coincidentally was the lowest-paid part of mathematics, doing the grunt work of computations. College-educated engineers considered the task of computing too tedious for them, but that it was not too tedious for college-educated women who made up the majority of the computers.

The concept of a program or programmer was not in use at this time.

Electronic computing at the time was envisioned by the developers as “nothing more than an automated form of hand computation.”

19

They would code into the machine language the higher-level math developed by male scientists and engineers. Coding implied manual labor, mechanical translation or rote transcription. Coding involved plugging in cables and setting switches on the ENIAC, but really much more.

Programming was not really understood at the time. The women had to distinguish hardware issues from software errors and developed an innate knowledge of the machine. Thousands of wires had to be plugged in each time a problem was to begin a run. The women had learned both the application and the machine so well that they could diagnose troubles, sometime better than the engineers..

The ENIAC project made a fundamental distinction between hardware and software: designing hardware was a man's job; programming was a woman's job. Each of these gendered parts of the project had its own clear status classification. Software, a secondary, clerical task, did not match the importance of constructing the ENIAC and getting it to work.

Finally Recognition Poured In The Army strongly encouraged them to stay on after the demonstration because no one knew how to program the ENIAC except the women.

Some of the women went on to do great things in the field of computing and in the late 1990’s due to the efforts of Kathy Kleiman, they started to be recognized: IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneer Award, 2009 On June 4, 2009, the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors awarded Jean Jennings Bartik the prestigious Computer Pioneer Award for pioneering work as one of the first programmers, including co-leading the first teams of ENIAC programmers, and pioneering work on BINAC and UNIVAC I. Computer History Museum Fellows Award, 2008 The Computer History Museum awarded ENIAC Programmer Jean Bartik its 2008 Fellows Award, a lifetime achievement award.

Computer History Museum Fellows Award, 2008 An Evening with Jean Bartik, 2008 Fellows Award Recipient, 2008 On October 22, 2008, ENIAC pioneer Jean Bartik spoke before a crowd of over 400 — young and old, women and men — to share her recollections of work in computing over 60 years.

20

Recognition (Con't) WITI Hall of Fame, 1997 Women in Technology International inducted all of the ENIAC Programmers into its Hall of Fame in 1997. ENIAC Programmers Betty Holberton, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Bartik and Marlyn Wesco were present, with Adolph Teitelman accepting in memory of his wife ENIAC Programmer Ruth Teitelbaum.

IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, 1997 ENIAC Programmer Betty Holberton received this award for her developing the sort-merge generator which IEEE told its members “inspired the first ideas about compilation.”

Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, 1997 The Association of Women in Computing presented Betty Holberton with its highest award in 1997.

I think this reflection from Jean prior to her death sums up the reality of the time: Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that “all the programmers who created the first general purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer. It happened because a lot of women back then studied math and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: The boys with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a man’s job. American science and engineering was even more sexist that it is today. If ENIAC’s administrators had known how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.”

They are all gone now, but their legacy now lives on. In fact Jean’s alma mater Northwest Missouri State University has a special virtual tour dedicated to her achievements and impact on computing.

21

References Online http://www.academia.edu/10105264/The_Secret_Women_of_the_Philadelphia_Computing_Section http://allen-riley.com/whitepage/25147356.pdf http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/pr1.pdf http://www.arl.army.mil/www/pages/shared/documents/50_years_of_army_computing.pdf https://www.army.mil/article/98817 https://www.britannica.com/technology/ENIAC http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/eniac.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2561559/computer-hardware/the-eckert-tapes--computer-pioneer-says-eniac-team-couldn-t-afford-to-fail---and-.html http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/remembering-eniac-and-the-women-who-programmed-it/ http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4407056/ENIAC-is-formally-announced--February-15--1946 http://ethw.org/ http://eniacprogrammers.org/ http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/comphist/eniac-story.html http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/comphist/46eniac-report/chap1.html http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/dates.html http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/comeniac.htm http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/Eniac.htm http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2015/11/invisible-women-the-six-human-computers-behind-the-eniac/ http://mentalfloss.com/article/53160/meet-refrigerator-ladies-who-programmed-eniac http://www.nwmissouri.edu/archives/index.htm http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/working-on-eniac-lost-labors-information-age/ http://philadelphiaweekly.com/2014/apr/2/Original_Geek-253453941/#.V8JsLZgrLIU http://www.phillyvoice.com/70-years-ago-six-philly-women-eniac-digital-computer-programmers/ http://www.rarenewspapers.com/view/590027?imagelist=1#full-images 22

References (con't) Online (con't) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270904334_The_Secret_Women_of_the_Philadelphia_Computing_Section https://www.seas.gwu.edu/~mfeldman/csci110/summer08/eniac2.pdf https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli http://sites.temple.edu/topsecretrosies/ http://www.slideshare.net/sadukie/history-of-women-in-tech-43388612 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-brief-history-of-the-eniac-computer-3889120/?no-ist http://the-eniac.com/ www.thecomputerworeheels.com http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v42/n18/eniac.html http://www.upenn.edu/computing/printout/pdf/v12/mar.pdf http://www.ushistory.org/more/eniac/public.htm http://www.welchco.com/02/14/01/60/96/11/1301.HTM http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Programmers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,-Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-and-Ruth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/ http://womensenews.org/2012/03/women-were-first-computer-programmers/ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aPweFhhXFvY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buAYHonF968 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bGk9W65vXNA http://www.zdnet.com/article/eniac-first-computer-makes-history/ Book Bartik, Jean Jennngs (2013). – Pioneer Programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the Computer That Changed the World . Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press.

23