Proving ground, p.1
Proving Ground, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by First Byte Productions, LLC
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Cover images: top: (left) courtesy of the Bartik family; (center) by © Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty images; (right) courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library; bottom: (left) by © CORBIS/Getty Images; (center and background code image) Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, PA; (right) University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kleiman, Kathy, author.
Title: Proving ground : the untold story of the six women who programmed the world’s first modern computer / Kathy Kleiman.
Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022004309 | ISBN 9781538718285 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781538718278 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women computer programmers—United States—Biography. | Computer programmers—United States—Biography. | ENIAC (Computer)
Classification: LCC QA76.2.A2 K56 2022 | DDC 004.092/2 [B]—dc23/eng/20220412
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004309
ISBN: 9781538718285 (hardcover), 9781538718278 (ebook)
E3-20220525-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Preface
The Double Doors Open
Looking for Women Math Majors
We Were Strangers There
Nestled in a Corner of the Base
Give Other People as Much Credit as You Give Yourself
We Found Things in a Not Very Good State
Adding Machines and Radar
3436 Walnut Street
The Monster in the Basement
The Lost Memo
“Give Goldstine the Money”
Dark Days of the War
“All That Machinery Just to Do One Little Thing Like That”
The Kissing Bridge
Are You Scared of Electricity?
Learning It Her Way
Surrounded by Vultures
The Dean’s Antechamber
A New Project
Divide and Conquer
A Sequencing of the Problem
A Tremendously Big Thing
Programs and Pedaling Sheets
Bench Tests and Best Friends
Parallel Programming
Sines and Cosines
The ENIAC Room Is Theirs!
The Last Bugs Before Demonstration Day
Demonstration Day, February 15, 1946
A Strange Afterparty
Hundred-Year Problems and Programmers Needed
The Moore School Lectures
Their Own Adventures
ENIAC 5 in and around Aberdeen
A New Life
Epilogue
Photos
Postscript
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Proving Ground Reading Group Guide
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
To Betty, Kay, Jean, and Marlyn for sharing your stories so generously,
To Sam and Robin for listening to me tell and retell them, and
To Mark for joining in the journey
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Cast of Characters
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer Programmers (the ENIAC 6)
Kathleen McNulty/“Kay”—Math graduate of all-women’s Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She was recruited to the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School in 1942 and became supervisor of a team operating the differential analyzer from 1942 to 1945. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC, and moved with ENIAC to Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG) after World War II to continue her programming work.
Frances Bilas/“Fran”—Math graduate of Chestnut Hill College and Kay’s best friend. She was recruited to the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School in 1942 and became the supervisor of a team operating the differential analyzer from 1942 to 1945. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC, and moved with ENIAC to APG after WWII to continue her programming work.
Frances Elizabeth Snyder/“Betty”—Graduate of University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School in 1942. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC, and moved with ENIAC after WWII to APG to continue her programming work. She became an early employee of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation working with the first commercial computers and went on to a forty-year career at the cutting-edge of computing and programming.
Marlyn Wescoff—Graduate of Temple University. She joined an Army radar project at the Moore School in 1942 and became part of the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section in 1943. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC’s ballistics trajectory program.
Ruth Lichterman—Undergraduate studying math at Hunter College in New York City when she was recruited to the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School in 1943. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC and moved with ENIAC after WWII to APG to continue her programming work. She then returned to the Moore School to work on other projects.
Jean Jennings—Math graduate of Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Maryville, Missouri. She moved to Philadelphia in 1945 to join the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section. In 1945, she was chosen to program ENIAC. After WWII when ENIAC moved to APG, she continued her work with ENIAC, helping to design and program its Converter Code and hiring and leading a programming team to deliver the Ballistic Research Laboratory’s (BRL) first wind tunnel programs for ENIAC. She continued at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and had an active career in computing and computer publishing.
Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Harold Pender—First dean of Moore School. He contracted with the BRL for Moore School to host the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section during WWII. Under his tenure, J. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly built ENIAC.
Dr. John Grist Brainerd/“Grist”—Moore School instructor, dean, and Director of Research. He was the liaison to BRL at APG for the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section and later the ENIAC project. He was close to Lieutenant Herman Goldstine.
Joe Chapline—Beginning in May 1942, he was a research associate at Moore School and a maintenance engineer on the differential analyzer. He was a champion of John’s computing ideas and connected Herman Goldstine with John Mauchly.
Dr. John Mauchly—Received his PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University. He was a professor at Ursinus College when he left to answer the Army’s call for men with electronics abilities during World War II. He was cofounder of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and co-inventor of the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer, ENIAC, and its successors BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer) and UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), the first modern commercial computers.
J. Presper Eckert Jr./“Pres”—Electrical engineering graduate of the Moore School. He was a lab instructor there when Mauchly first met him. He was cofounder of Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and co-inventor of ENIAC, BINAC, and UNIVAC and was considered one of the finest electrical engineers of the twentieth century.
Dr. Irven Travis—Electrical engineering professor at the Moore School who was called to active duty in 1941. He returned in 1946 and became Director of Research. He ended up clashing with John and Pres over patent rights.
Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland
Colonel (later Major General) Leslie E. Simon—Director of BRL during WWII. He created the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School during WWII with Captain Paul Gillon and worked with John Grist Brainerd and Herman Goldstine. He negotiated and approved the contract with the Moore School to build ENIAC and relocate it to BRL after its acceptance by the Army.
Captain (later Colonel) Paul N. Gillon—Assistant Director of BRL during WWII. He was Herman Goldstine’s senior officer and cocreator of the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School with Colonel Simon. He supported BRL’s funding of ENIAC and worked with the Moore School team from time to time.
Lieutenant (later Captain) Herman Goldstine—PhD in math from University of Chicago, where he studied under Dr. Gilbert Bliss. After being sent to BRL during WWII, he was assigned to head the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School and served as liaison from BRL to the Moore School. He introduced the BRL to the idea of ENIAC and was involved in its construction and demonstration. After WWII, he was a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and then went to IBM.
Adele Goldstine (née Katz)—Graduate of Hunter College, with a master’s degree in math from University of Michigan. She revamped instruction at the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section at the Moore School to educate dozens of young women in graduate-level numerical analysis for trajectory calculations. She wrote the technical manual for ENIAC and after WWII helped design the ENIAC Converter Code and helped convert ENIAC to one of the world’s first stored-program computers. She was the wife of Herman Goldstine.
John Holberton—Beloved civilian supervisor of the Army’s Philadelphia Computing Section, he reported to Lieutenant Goldstine and worked with him on the ENIAC project too. He moved with the ENIAC to APG after WWII and spent a career in computing.
Major General Oswald Veblen—Professor at Princeton for decades and early member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He joined APG during WWI and worked on ballistics research and calculations. He founded a program to calculate ballistics trajectories for APG, which he insisted continue between WWI and WWII. He was named Chief Scientist of BRL during WWII and made the final decision to fund ENIAC.
Preface
As I stared at the women in the black-and-white photograph, it seemed as though they were trying to tell me something. I was sitting in Harvard’s Lamont Library, a main library for undergraduates, trying to research a paper on American women in the twentieth century who were leaders in computing. I knew of only one, Captain Grace Hopper of the US Navy, later Rear Admiral Hopper. Of course, there was Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of British poet Lord Byron, who worked on early programming concepts in the nineteenth century, but she was out of scope for an American women’s history course.
I was a young woman in computing, and I wanted to know if there were others. I had taken computer science since I started college, and while my early programming courses were composed of about half women, my latest class had only one or two. I knew I would feel more comfortable in computing if I saw a few more women in class with me, and this drove my interest in who came before me and what they had done.
Open before me, spread across the reading room table, were encyclopedias of computer science and histories of computing. Noticeably absent in all of them were the names of women, except Ada and Grace. But noticeably absent, too, was any real history of programming. The stories were all about hardware and the men who built the mainframe computers that dominated computer history in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.
But what about those who pioneered ways to communicate with the large computers? Instruction codes and programming languages also date back to the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, but where were the stories of the people who wrote them?
Then I stumbled on a black-and-white photograph of a huge, black, metal computer dominating three sides of a large room and dwarfing six people—four men and two women.
University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania
There were two men in the middle of the photo, two women on the right with a man in uniform between them, and a man in the back left. Only the two men in the middle were named—J. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly, co-inventors of ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) during World War II. Nowhere in the captions or accompanying article were the other people in the photograph named.
I studied the image closely, especially the women. They were young, with World War II–era hairdos, flat shoes, and skirt suits. As I leaned in closer, what struck me was that they seemed to know something about ENIAC. They appeared to be comfortable, knowledgeable as they adjusted knobs on and read documents next to this vast, seemingly living and breathing giant. I could not stop looking at them.
I knew something about computers. My father was an electrical engineer who specialized in new technologies. He brought home electronics for us, including an early calculator, clunky and huge compared to today’s versions, with only a few functions, but fascinating and fun to play with. He was the first person I knew to talk about speech synthesis and voice recognition. My father had written his dissertation on the founding of the semiconductor industry and was certain that the miniaturization of electronics would continue and would keep changing the world.
Friends asked me in junior high school if I wanted to learn to program computers, and I said yes. So I joined an Explorer Post, a coed branch of the Boy Scouts dedicated to career exploration, and went off to spend my Wednesday nights at Western Electric, a manufacturing arm of AT&T near my home in Columbus, Ohio. I learned BASIC, a programming language invented at Dartmouth in the 1960s. Soon I was playing games my friends wrote and adding one of my own, a version of Mad Libs that I wrote in BASIC. The first time my friends played it and laughed out loud at the funny story the computer printed, I knew I was hooked on programming.
Looking at the old black-and-white picture, and the men and women standing before ENIAC, I longed to know more about their story. I dug deeper, found more books, and uncovered another photograph. This one was a close-up showing two young women standing right in front of ENIAC. Once again, no names of the women, only the name of the computer.
University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania
I made copies of both pictures and took them to my professor. Anthony Oettinger was a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery, an international group for computing professionals.
I showed him the two ENIAC photographs. “Who are the women?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Professor Oettinger answered, “but I know who might.”
He told me to visit Dr. Gwen Bell, cofounder of the Computer Museum, then in Boston and now in Silicon Valley.
The Computer Museum was at the far end of Museum Wharf in downtown Boston. As I walked down the long wharf, I noticed the Children’s Museum and in the water, the Boston Tea Party ships. All great to visit, but I was on a different mission as I clutched my folder of photographs and disappeared into the Computer Museum.
I found my way to the office of the museum’s director. Bell was in her early fifties with short, dark, graying hair, clearly a no-nonsense, busy person. I opened my folder and once again found myself pointing to the black-and-white images of the women who were standing in front of ENIAC.
“Who are the women?” I asked Bell.
Unlike Professor Oettinger, she knew. “They’re refrigerator ladies,” she said.
“What’s a refrigerator lady?” I asked, baffled as to what she was talking about.
“They’re models,” she responded, rolling her eyes. Like the Frigidaire models of the 1950s, who opened the doors of the new refrigerators with a flourish in black-and-white TV commercials, these women were just posed in front of ENIAC to make it look good. At least that’s what Dr. Bell thought.
She closed my folder and handed it back to me. I was dismissed.
I slowly headed out of the museum. I saw the children lined up on the wharf getting ready to enter the Children’s Museum, the Boston Tea Party ships rocking in the harbor, and the bright blue sky. But Bell’s story did not make sense to me. I had stood in front of big computers before. The first time you see them, they seem huge, overwhelming, almost surreal. The young women in the ENIAC pictures looked confident and assured. They looked like they knew exactly what this huge computer did and why they were in the photos. They did appear posed, but so did the men, and the men were not models.
