Four ENIAC programmers honored by women's group

The four female engineers who programmed ENIAC, the first all-electronic digital computer which was built at Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, were honored recently by a prominent group of women in the technology field. Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Snyder Holberton and Marilyn Wescoff Meltzer shared the story of their involvement with the historic project with more than 1,000 attendees of the Women In Technology International Summit in Boston on October 19. The two other female programmers, Ruth Teitelbaum and Frances Spence, did not attend. Teitelbaum, who is deceased, was represented at the conference by her husband. The six pioneers were selected in 1945 from a group of more than 80 women calculating ballistics for the U.S. Army at the University to program the computer. The classified project, which allowed the Army to calculate ballistics 5,000 times more quickly than before, was released to the public in 1947. The conference, which aimed to raise public awareness of women in technology, was the organization's last regional conference of the year. "All our conferences have the same basic goal -- to showcase women in technical fields," said Claudia Stevenson, WITI operations manager. For some, the recognition seems overdue. For many years, women in technical fields have been ignored, according to Antonelli, who married John Mauchly -- one of two ENIAC inventors. "The most astonishing thing is that it is now 50 years later and the world is first discovering the women programmers," she said. "It is just now that we're getting recognized." Recognition wasn't the only problem the women faced. Programming the first computer was far from easy. "We didn't have any manuals or guidelines -- they didn't exist," Antonelli said. "We had to program the computer manually. It was a learn-by-doing activity. But once completed, the impact of the ENIAC was immediate. Prior to its construction, an engineer needed about 30 hours to calculate the trajectory of one missile by hand. This is the first year that WITI is holding regional conferences rather than one or two larger ones. The conferences have been successful in recent years, with attendance up over the past three years, Stevenson said. She added that companies have an increased awareness of the contributions of women on the field of technology. Antonelli praised the women at the conference. "I was very impressed with the ability and qualifications of the women who attended the conference," she said. "Many women now hold fairly high-powered jobs." Antonelli also had some words of advice for potential female engineers. "Opportunity comes to prepared minds. Get whatever you can, learn whatever you can, so you can be prepared for the future," said Antonelli. In addition to ENIAC, the six programmers made other contributions to the field of computer science. Teitelbaum, Spence and Antonelli relocated with the ENIAC to Aberdeen, Md., where they taught other engineers to use the computer. Bartik programmed the BINAC, which used magnetic tape to store data. She also designed logic for UNIVAC1, which was structurally similar to modern computers. After programming the ENIAC, Holberton designed the control console for UNIVAC1. She also designed its computer keyboard and numeric keypad and worked on both the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages. The six ENIAC programmers were inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame in 1997.