Frances Spence – another unhonored ENIAC developer

Frances Spence

One more from the core female developers of ENIAC. As other women, she mostly went unhonored – because female contributions didn’t match societies’ expectations:

Photos of these women working on the computer often went without credit in newspapers at the time, and when the ENIAC was completed and unveiled to the public on February 15, 1946, the US Army failed to mention the names of the female programmers who had programmed the machine to run such sophisticated calculations. This further contributed to the perceived disconnect between women and computing.

(Read more on Wikipedia)

ENIAC: Betty Jean Jennings Bartik

The ENIAC's main control panel with Bartnik on the left.

Bartik was one of the leading developers of the ENIAC trajectory computer, and she was quite proud of its first public presentation in 1946:

“The day ENIAC was introduced to the world was one of the most exciting days of my life. The demonstration was fabulous. ENIAC calculated the trajectory faster than it took the bullet to travel. We handed out copies of the calculations as they were run. ENIAC was 1,000 times faster than any machine that existed prior to that time. With its flashing lights, it also was an impressive machine illustrating graphically how fast it was actually computing.”

(more at Wikipedia)