Proving ground, p.23
Proving Ground, page 23
Jean attended the WITI Hall of Fame. Soon afterward, a young cousin, one of the Jennings clan who attended the Northwest Missouri State University (NWMSU) nearby, told the university about Jean’s accomplishments. Jon Rickman, Vice President of Information Systems at the school, contacted Jean and in July 2001, Jean’s picture appeared on the front cover of Northwest Alumni magazine, with the title “Computer Pioneer, Jean Bartik ’45, Opening the Door of Opportunity.” A year later, Jean was honored as commencement speaker and proudly rode with the university’s president in the commencement procession on April 27, 2002.
Jean thought carefully about her commencement address and titled it “10 Proverbs of Life.” She gave her favorite pieces of advice to the young graduates, advice she learned from decades of work and experience, including:
#1 It pays to dream…
#3 When opportunity knocks, answer the door…
#5 New and exciting beats dull and boring…
She ended with a favorite phrase of hers: “You can get the girl out of Missouri but you can’t get Missouri out of the girl,” which she said with a huge belly laugh.10
NWMSU created a home for Jean’s collections, files and memoirs, now part of the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum. It houses Jean’s treasured notes, diagrams, and photographs of ENIAC, BINAC, UNIVAC, minicomputers, and more.
Jon Rickman and Kim Todd of NWMSU helped Jean edit her manuscript, along with her son, Tim Bartik, and it is now published as the book Pioneer Programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the Computer that Changed the World (Truman State University Press). It is written in Jean’s inimitable style, with her deep computer knowledge, candor, and strong sense of humor.
Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Snyder Holberton (1917–2001)
It is impossible to encapsulate Betty’s full range of contributions to computing or programming in just a few paragraphs. She started in computing in the mid-1940s and continued with a career that ran uninterrupted into the early 1980s. During that time, she created cutting-edge tools for programming, including the first modern sort routine and a very early software application. She, Jean, and Grace Hopper joined John Mauchly and about two dozen early programming pioneers to sign the charter of the Association for Computing Machinery at Columbia University on September 15, 1947, and dedicate it to computing and programming education and research.
After her work for BRL at the Proving Ground, Betty joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as one of the first ten employees. Her rank was considered “management,” and her title was elevated to “engineer.”
When Pres designed the magnetic tape and tape drives and needed an input/output system, he asked Betty to design and write one, and she did. It was very versatile and could store data and read it in forward or reverse order.
When John needed an instruction code for UNIVAC, he asked Betty to write it. The result was the C-10 instruction code, which shipped on every UNIVAC I. Betty’s C-10 was so powerful, mnemonic, and easy to remember, said Mildred Koss, a UNIVAC Programmer for EMCC and later VP of information technology for Harvard University.
Betty then used the C-10 to create a sort routine and insisted it be shipped with every UNIVAC I. Her sort routine became the “killer app” of the 1950s.
In his book The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching, Professor Donald Knuth described Betty’s groundbreaking sort routing as “a perfect overlap of reading, writing, and computing, using six input buffers.” In her obituary in the New York Times in 2001, Knuth hailed Betty as “a real software pioneer.”
Betty joined John Mauchly in traveling widely to help businesses think about how they could use computers. She talked with Prudential Insurance, overflowing with customer data including premiums and payments, and Nielsen, the national survey company, which could not process their surveys as quickly as they wanted. Both became early customers of UNIVAC.
In 1950, Betty married John Holberton, and they delayed their honeymoon for a year while Betty joined John and Pres in preparing the first UNIVAC I for shipment. A year later, the couple left for the United Kingdom by ship for their long-overdue honeymoon.
Betty played key roles in writing and testing new and powerful programming languages. She served as chief editor of the initial COBOL report (as editor of the language, she reviewed every command and specification of the new language before it was introduced) and wrote important test routines for Fortran, another powerful early programming language.
Most of the time, Betty was the only working mother she knew in Potomac, Maryland. When she arrived home after work, she started a second shift as the leader of her daughters’ Girl Scouts troop and other activities. Betty and John’s two daughters, Priscilla and Pamela, heard a lot of computer talk around the table, and Betty said that as young children, they ran around the yard yelling, “hardball, software, COBOL” as one of their playtime refrains.
In the 1960s, opposed to the Vietnam War, Betty and John both left military work. Betty joined the National Bureau of Standards, where she worked on many projects and served in many roles. When NATO needed an American expert to check computer installations in Italy, they sent Betty to figure out the problems. Later she was asked to serve on the US delegation to negotiate a European treaty with standards for magnetic tapes so that they could be passed back and forth across the Atlantic with ease. In these positions, Betty was one of very few women, which she found lonely. But it did not stop her from her doing work as the most senior computing member of both teams.
For her entire life, Betty cared deeply about computer users: “The user was the one who paid the bill,” she said, “and so that was very important.”11
Before Betty retired from the National Bureau of Standards, she received the Silver Medal for “exceptional service”—a rare honor. Secretary of Commerce Elliot Richardson awarded it to her, and as he handed her the medal, he leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I’m glad a woman made it.” Her career spanned over forty years.
At eighty years old, and following a stroke, Betty traveled from Washington, DC, to Santa Clara, California, to join other members of the ENIAC 6 at the WITI induction ceremony for the Hall of Fame. The head of IBM’s Mainframe Division, Linda Sanford, delivered a speech outlining the six women’s work during World War II, calculating ballistics trajectories, and programming ENIAC. No one in the audience had previously known this story.
Betty gave a short acceptance speech. She made jokes about the Demonstration Day bug, calling it her first do-loop error, but then grew serious.
We didn’t have a thing like that [WITI] fifty years ago,” she said, “and we could have sure used it. I think that all of you women will be successful if you can put people like that behind you. You just need it. And I am so proud of those people who recognize women.12
Her voice cracked and she began to cry. The applause spread through the convention room. Then the audience rose in a wave across the huge room. First the women in the front rose, and then the women behind them, all the way to the back, a massive wave. Everyone was on their feet, applauding and crying, giving Betty, Jean, Marlyn, and Adolph an unexpected standing ovation. The noise grew louder and louder until it filled the room.
Endnotes
Looking for Women Math Majors
1. Josephine Benson Manfredi, in interview with author and Amy Sohn, February 29, 2020.
2. “Chestnut Hill College Graduates Class of 107,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1942, 13.
3. “Chestnut Hill College Graduates Class of 107.”
4. “Students Graduating into World at War,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1942, 20.
5. Josephine Betts Caldwell, “History of the Class of 1940,” Record Book of the Class of 1940 University of Pennsylvania, 24, https://archives.upenn.edu/digitized-resources/docs-pubs/womens-yearbooks/yearbook-1940.
6. Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, interview by author and directed by David Roland, recorded in the home of Mrs. Antonelli, September 18, 1997, transcript, ENIAC Programmers Oral History Project, 4. (Henceforth cited as Antonelli, Oral History.)
7. “College Girls to Present Style Show,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 1942, 68.
8. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
9. See, e.g., Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 1942, 53.
10. “The Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Story,” March 26, 2004, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli. (Henceforth cited as Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”)
11. Kimberly Amadeo, “Unemployment Rate by Year Since 1929 Compared to Inflation and GDP,” The Balance, November 10, 2021, https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506.
12. For example, “Women & World War II,” Metropolitan State University of Denver, https://temp.msudenver.edu/camphale/thewomensarmycorps/womenwwii/.
13. For example, “‘Rosie the Riveter’ Song Lyrics,” http://jackiewhiting.net/us/rosielyrics.html.
14. Alfred Palmer, photographer, The More Women at Work, the Sooner We Win!, 1943, World War II Posters. Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-5600, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/awpnp6/d13.html.
15. Norman Rockwell Museum; “Rosie The Riveter—1943,” https://www.nrm.org/rosie-the-riveter/.
16. Ruth Milkman, “Redefining ‘Women’s Work’: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Auto Industry during World War II,” in “Women and Work,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 336–72.
17. Evelyn Steele, Wartime Opportunities for Women (New York, 1943), 99–100, cited in Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 457.
18. “Specialized War Jobs Seek Girl Math Majors,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 28, 1943, 4.
19. “‘Haven’t Felt Pinch of War,’ Women Told,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 11, 1943, 20.
20. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
21. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
22. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
23. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
24. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
25. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
26. “We spoke only Gaellic in our house in Ireland and the United States,” Kay wrote in her autobiographical piece. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
27. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
28. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
29. Antonelli, Oral History, 2.
30. Antonelli, Oral History, 2.
31. Antonelli, Oral History, 2.
32. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
33. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
34. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
35. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
36. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
37. Antonelli, Oral History, 4.
38. W. Barkley Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996): 23.
39. Engineering and Technology Wiki, “Frances Spence,” https://ethw.org/Frances_Spence.
40. Antonelli, in interview with author, April 18, 2000.
41. Engineering and Technology Wiki, “Frances Spence.”
42. Manfredi, interview, February 29, 2020.
43. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
44. “Changes in Women’s Occupations 1940–1950,” Women’s Bureau Bulletin 253, United States Department of Labor (1954): 3.
45. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
46. Antonelli, “The KMMA Story.”
47. Herbert Ershkowitz, “World War II,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2011, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/world-war-ii/.
48. Ershkowitz, “World War II.”
49. Manfredi, interview, February 29, 2020. Manfredi described her friendship with Kathleen McNulty and her own activities in college and during WWII. She shared information about the Cinderella Group of approximately fifty young women who hosted dances for soldiers during WWII that ended promptly at midnight.
50. See, e.g., “Edward R. Murrow, A Hero of Broadcast Journalism,” https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1990/august/edward-r-murrow-a-hero-of-broadcast-journalism/.
51. Richard Holmes, “Maria Mitchell at 200: A Pioneering Astronomer Who Fought for Women in Science,” Nature, June 18, 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05458-6.
52. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
53. Professional and scientific jobs were “based on the established principles of a profession or science” and required professional, scientific, or technical training equivalent to recognized-standing college or university training. Rachel Fesler Nyswander and Janet M. Hooks, Employment of Women in the Federal Government, 1923 to 1939, Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau No. 182, US Government Printing Office, 1941, 12.
54. W. Barkley Fritz, “ENIAC—A Problem Solver,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16, no. 1 (1994): 28.
55. Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Snyder Holberton, interview by author and directed by David Roland, recorded in the library of the Shady Grove Center, Rockville, MD, September 23–24, 1997, transcript, ENIAC Programmers Oral History Project, 12. (Henceforth cited as Holberton, Oral History.)
We Were Strangers There
1. Antonelli, Oral History, 9.
2. J. N. Shurkin, Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996):118–19. (Henceforth cited as Shurkin, Engines of the Mind.)
3. Peter Eckstein, “J. Presper Eckert,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 1 (1996): 36.
4. Harold Pender to Dr. Musser, June 8, 1942, University Relations Information Files, UPF 5I, Box 108, File “Ballistics Calculations Courses,” University Archives and Records Center, University of Pennsylvania.
5. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
6. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
7. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
8. Antonelli, Oral History, 5.
9. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” 13–28.
10. Thomas J. Bergin, ed., 50 Years of Army Computing, From ENIAC to MSRC: A Record of a Symposium and Celebration, November 13 and 14, 1996 (sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and U.S. Army Ordnance Center & School, September 2000), 40.
11. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” 15.
12. “It’s quite complex. It depends on the barometric pressure, the humidity, the curvature of the earth, all kinds of factors. It’s a very complicated equation that has to be solved for each data point, for each range that you want to compute the aiming of the gun at,” Dr. Paul Ceruzzi, Historian, Smithsonian Institution. Kathy Kleiman, The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, produced by Kathy Kleiman, Jon Palfreman, and Kate McMahon, video documentary, Women Make Movies distributor, 2014.
13. Antonelli, Oral History, 6.
14. Discussion of Shirley Blumberg Melvin about problems with the Monroe and Marchant desktop calculators that she worked with. LeAnn Erickson, director, Top Secret Rosies, 2011, https://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-Rosies-Female-Computers/dp/B00443FMKC.
15. Antonelli, Oral History, 9.
Nestled in a Corner of the Base
1. Aberdeen Proving Ground, “History,” https://home.army.mil/apg/index.php/about/history.
2. Aberdeen Proving Ground, “History.”
3. See, e.g., Shelford Bidwell, ed., Brassey’s Artillery of the World: Guns, Howitzers, Mortars, Guided Weapons, Rockets and Ancillary Equipment in Service with the Regular and Reserve Forces of All Nations (London: Brassey’s Publishers Ltd., 1977), 29.
4. Communications methods of World War I included field telephones, radios, messenger dogs, and even carrier pigeons. In one famous example, “Cher Ami, a carrier pigeon of the US Army Signal Corps flew wounded to carry the message of an isolated battalion in need of help. The lives of almost two hundred soldiers were saved.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Cher Ami,” https://www.si.edu/object/cher-ami%3Anmah_425415.
5. Saunders Mac Lane, Oswald Veblen, 1880–1960, National Academy of Sciences, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/veblen-oswald.pdf.
6. The Range Firing Section, under Major Oswald Veblen, was one of the original nine divisions of Aberdeen Providing Ground. Henry Reid, “Ballisticians inWar and Peace, Volume I, 1914–1956.” U.S. Army Research Laboratory, AberdeenProving Ground, MD, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA300523.pdf.
7. Reid, “Ballisticians in War and Peace, Volume I,” 3.
8. Reid, “Ballisticians in War and Peace, Volume I,” 4–5.
9. Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 132.
10. Reid, “Ballisticians in War and Peace, Volume I,” 8.
11. For example, 155 mm M59 Long Tom, WeaponSystems.net, https://weaponsystems.net/system/920-155mm+M59+Long+Tom.
12. Reid, “Ballisticians in War and Peace, Volume I,” 9.
13. BRL’s Scientific Advisory Committee, 1940, First Meeting, https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/40sac/index.html.
14. Reid, “Ballisticians in War and Peace, Volume I,” 29.
15. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, 132.
Give Other People as Much Credit as You Give Yourself
1. Holberton, Oral History, 30.
2. See, e.g., “In the Military during World War II, National Women’s History Museum,” https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/military.
3. Holberton, Oral History, 30.
4. Holberton, Oral History, 43.
5. Holberton, Oral History, 46.
