Documentary on the women who hacked ENIAC

Danny sez,

The Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers is a documentary on one of the first programming teams: Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence.

The six-woman team hardwired code for ballistics trajectory calculations, but were overlooked in the previous accounts of the first US large-scale, electronic, digital computer in 1946.

The documentary is being previewed at Google next Thursday -- they production team are looking for donations to finish it off and show it elsewhere.

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

[#1 posted by John Wiedey , October 30, 2007 6:30 AM]

I wouldn't have busted Benny Hill if it wasn't for the bow tie.

[#2 posted by Huffington Glue , October 30, 2007 9:12 AM]

Their is a good book called "Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age".
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Brains-Mike-Hally/dp/1862078394

The book discusses the teams of women who programmed early computers like ENIAC.

Just thought i'd share.

[#3 posted by Martin , October 30, 2007 10:21 AM]

I think I've seen one of those women pretending to be Roosevelt at Yalta.

[#4 posted by Danelda , October 30, 2007 10:50 AM]

I'm disappointed to see that an article that is about the overlooking of women's contributions to technology has two of its first three comments about their appearance.

Thanks for illustrating the point.

[#5 posted by NE2d , October 30, 2007 11:40 AM]

An interesting story. I never would have guessed that any women worked on this project, much less that it was done almost entirely by women. According to this,

The first programmers started out as "Computers." This was the name given by the Army to a group of over 80 women working at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II calculating ballistics trajectories - complex differential equations - by hand. When the Army agreed to fund an experimental project, the first all-electronic digital computer, six "Computers" were selected in 1945 to be its first programmers. They were Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum.

I'm sure it was partly due to the dearth of men stateside during WWII, but still a remarkable story.

[#6 posted by ohbejoyful , October 30, 2007 6:58 PM]

Other famous women in computing history include Ada Lovelace (wrote the first computer program - it calculated Bernoulli numbers) and Admiral Grace Hopper (created the first compiler).

[#7 posted by musicman , October 30, 2007 8:05 PM]

I highly recommend Zeros and Ones by Sadie Plant as being a great read in regards to the historical impact of women in computing and the web:
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/body/lgl1.html

[#8 posted by Martin , October 31, 2007 1:24 AM]

I believe that there were a lot of women at Bletchley Park, too.