Overview

"In early 1945, the United States military was recruiting female mathematicians for a top-secret project to help win World War II. Betty Jean Jennings (Bartik), a twenty-year-old college graduate from rural north-west Missouri, wanted an adventure, so she applied for the job. She was hired as a ""computer"" to calculate artillery shell trajectories for Aberdeen Proving Ground, and later joined a team of women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the first successful general-purpose programmable electronic computer. In 1946, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first stored-program electronic computer. Even with her talents, Bartik met obstacles in her career due to attitudes about women's roles in the workplace. Her perseverance paid off and she worked with the earliest computer pioneers and helped launch the commercial computer industry. Despite their contributions, Bartik and the other female ENIAC programmers have been largely ignored. In the only autobiography by any of the six original ENIAC programmers, Bartik tells her story, exposing myths about the computer's origin and properly crediting those behind the computing innovations that shape our daily lives."

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9781612480862

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This book is unique; it is not another secondhand retelling of the invention of the computer. It is not like the many technical histories that are part scholarly overview and part narrative designed to elevate some particular inventor to superhuman status. This is Jeans story. Bill Mauchly, son of ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly

Author Information

Kim D. Todd is Assistant Director of the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum and a user consultant with the Information Systems Department at Northeast Missouri State University. She was co-editor of Jean Bartik's autobiography, Pioneer Programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the Computer that Changed the World (Truman State University Press).

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