The ENIAC Programmers: First Electronic Computer
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was the first computer ever built. In 1946, six brilliant young women programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret WWII project. They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory—a differential calculus equation—in seconds. Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced; they remained invisible.
The ENIAC, an amazing creation by these amazing women, was not a stored-program computer; it is “better described as a collection of electronic adding machines and other arithmetic units, which were originally controlled by a web of large electrical cables.” It was programmed by a combination of plugboard wiring and three “portable function tables”. One of the peculiarities that distinguished ENIAC from all later computers was the way in which instructions were set up on the machine. It was similar to the plugboards of small punched-card machines, but here we had about 40 plugboards, each several feet in size. A number of wires had to be plugged for every single instruction of a problem, thousands of them each time a problem was to begin a run; and this took several days to do and many more days to check out. When that was finally accomplished, we would run the problem as long as possible, i.e. as long as we had input data, before changing over to another problem. Typically, changeovers occurred only once every few weeks.