Who were the ENIAC Six? Why were these woman critical to computing?
‘Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics . . . Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering… You will find that the slogan here as elsewhere is ‘WOMEN WANTED!’ Recruitment ad for ENIAC, 1945.
ENIAC was formally introduced to the public on the Fifteenth of February, 1946. The press called it the ‘Great Brain’. The project was initiated by the military in 1943 to design a machine capable of rapidly calculating artillery trajectories under a secret project code-named Project PX
ENIAC could branch. Trigger different operations depending on the result of the previous operation. That was a new development in computing.
The ENIAC Six were computing pioneers. The ENIAC didn’t have a memory. It was essentially a bunch of adding machines connected by cables. It had to be programmed by hand to set various tables of numbers. This came down to setting 1,200 ten-way switches. Something, apparently, no man had the patience to figure out.
