When ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School in February 1946, six women had done the work of programming it: Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances “Betty” Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum. They had previously been “computers” in the literal sense, hand-calculating wartime ballistic firing tables, and were assigned to make the new machine produce the same trajectories. They worked without manuals or programming languages, because none existed yet; they figured out how to route a problem through the machine’s switches and cables themselves.
The missile-trajectory calculation that anchored the celebrated 1946 demonstration was devised by Bartik and Holberton. Yet, as Penn’s own account records, the women were largely written out: published photographs and articles featured the men, the women were not invited to the celebratory dinner at Houston Hall afterward, and for decades some who saw the archival photos assumed the women pictured were models posed beside the machine rather than its programmers.
Recognition came slowly. The ENIAC Programmers Project, led by Kathy Kleiman, set out to document them through interviews, a film, and a book, on the premise that “the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told in full.” Several of the six were later inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. Their story is a recurring pattern in computing and AI history: the people who first made a machine actually do something were not the ones who got remembered for it.