A Little History To Go With That Lesson

Did you know the first actual computer was a woman? Actually it was a group of women whose job title was "computer". During the 1940's a group of approximatley 75 female mathematicians were employed by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering as "Computers". They were responsible for making calculations for tables of firing and bombing trajectories as part of the war effort.

Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli is quoted as saying

"We did have desk calculators at that time, mechanical and driven with electric motors, that could do simple arithmetic. You'd do a mulitiplication and when the answer appeared, you had to write it down to reenter it into the machine to do the next calculation. We were preparing a firing table for each gun, with maybe 1,800 simple trajectories. To hand-computer just one of these trajectories took 30 or 40 hours of sitting at a desk with paper and a calculator. As you can imagine, they were soon running out of young women to do the calculations. Actually, my title working the ballistics project was 'computer'. The idea was that I not only did arithmetic but also made the decision on what to do next. ENIAC made me, one of the first 'computers,' obsolete."

ENIAC was the world's first electronic digital computer. In came about in 1946.

Another notable woman in computing history was Adele Goldstine. She was the wife of Dr. Herman Goldstine, who assisted in the creation of the ENIAC. Mrs. Goldstine made a gigantic contribution to the ENIAC project writing the Manual for the ENIAC. This was the original technically detailed description of the ENIAC.

One of the first software patents ever issued was issued to woman. It was Patent # 3,623,007 on November 23, 1971 to Erna Schneider Hoover. She began a researching career at Bell Laboratories in 1954. She invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic. It replaced the old hard-wired mechanical switching equipment that is often seen in old time photos of telephone operators plugging lines into big phone boards. The principals of Ms. Hoover's invention are still in use today. She went on to become the very first female supervisor of a techinal department at Bell Labs.

Ever wonder where the term "computer bug" came from? Well, it came from a woman. Grace Murray Hopper coined the phrase when she found a real bug in a computer. Grace Hopper is another incredibly amazing women who had a profound affect on computers as we know them today. Grace Murray Hopper invented the first computer "compiler" in 1952. Before the compiler software programmers had to use binary code which consisted of only 0's and 1's. This made programming difficult and time-consuming and was usually contained many frustrating errors. Hopper wrote a new program allowed software developers to write new programs without having to write repetitive binary code. The compiler program whould have the computer refer to codes in its own memory that were common to all programs.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic