Remembering The ENIAC Programmers (freedom-to-tinker.com) 85
On Princeton's "Freedom to Tinker" site, the founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project summarizes 20 years of its research, remembering the "incredible acts of computing innovation during and just after WWII" that "established the foundation of modern computing and programming."
Commissioned in 1942, and launched in 1946, the ENIAC computer, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was the world's very first modern computer (all-electronic, programmable, and general-purpose). "Key technologists of the time, of course, told the Army that the ENIAC would never work."
Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Cory Doctorow: The ENIAC programmers had to invent programming as we know it, working without programming codes (these were invented a few years later for UNIVAC by Betty Holberton): they "broke down the differential calculus ballistics trajectory program" into small steps the computer could handle, then literally wired together the program by affixing cables and flicking the machine's 3,000 switches in the correct sequences. To capture it all, they created meticulous flowcharts that described the program's workings.
From the site: Gunners needed to know what angle to shoot their artillery to hit a target 8 to 10 miles away.... The Army's Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) located women math graduates from schools nearby [who] worked day and night, six days a week, calculating thousands of ballistics trajectories which were compiled into artillery firing tables and sent to soldiers in the battlefields. It was a tremendous effort. Second, the Army and BRL agreed to commission a highly-experimental machine... [Six] women studied ENIAC's wiring and logical diagrams and taught themselves how to program it...
After the war, the Army asked all six ENIAC Programmers to continue their work -- no solider returning home from the battlefield could program ENIAC... Others made other pivotal contributions: Jean Bartik led the team that converted ENIAC to one of the world's first stored program computer and her best friend Betty Holberton joined Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and wrote critical new programming tools for UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer, including the C-10 instruction code (predecessor to programming languages). You can still find its original operating manual online. ("Do not open d-c fuse cabinet with the d-c power turned on. This not only exposes a person to voltage differences of around 1500 volts but the person may be burned by flying pieces of molten fuse wire in case a fuse should blow.")
It performed calculations that helped design the world's first hydrogen bomb.
Commissioned in 1942, and launched in 1946, the ENIAC computer, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was the world's very first modern computer (all-electronic, programmable, and general-purpose). "Key technologists of the time, of course, told the Army that the ENIAC would never work."
Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Cory Doctorow: The ENIAC programmers had to invent programming as we know it, working without programming codes (these were invented a few years later for UNIVAC by Betty Holberton): they "broke down the differential calculus ballistics trajectory program" into small steps the computer could handle, then literally wired together the program by affixing cables and flicking the machine's 3,000 switches in the correct sequences. To capture it all, they created meticulous flowcharts that described the program's workings.
From the site: Gunners needed to know what angle to shoot their artillery to hit a target 8 to 10 miles away.... The Army's Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) located women math graduates from schools nearby [who] worked day and night, six days a week, calculating thousands of ballistics trajectories which were compiled into artillery firing tables and sent to soldiers in the battlefields. It was a tremendous effort. Second, the Army and BRL agreed to commission a highly-experimental machine... [Six] women studied ENIAC's wiring and logical diagrams and taught themselves how to program it...
After the war, the Army asked all six ENIAC Programmers to continue their work -- no solider returning home from the battlefield could program ENIAC... Others made other pivotal contributions: Jean Bartik led the team that converted ENIAC to one of the world's first stored program computer and her best friend Betty Holberton joined Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and wrote critical new programming tools for UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer, including the C-10 instruction code (predecessor to programming languages). You can still find its original operating manual online. ("Do not open d-c fuse cabinet with the d-c power turned on. This not only exposes a person to voltage differences of around 1500 volts but the person may be burned by flying pieces of molten fuse wire in case a fuse should blow.")
It performed calculations that helped design the world's first hydrogen bomb.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Only women? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got an Illiac manual, about a decade later than Eniac I think, and it had a chunk of women working on it also. Women were relatively common in computing until the mid 80s. I also have a paper from the first talk given about Unix, and almost half the invites were were women.
Re:Only women? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, not all early programmers were men. Beth Holberton's title was "Chief of the Programming Research Branch" when she worked for the Naval Surface Warfare Research Center. She designed and programmed the first mainframe sort/merge algorithm, and participated in the design of the first programming languages.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
But the actual handful of guys who worked specifically on ENIAC were men.
The "programmers" who figured out how to get useful ballistics results from a roomful of women crunching numbers by hand (most of whom weren't trusted to subtract, so the programmers had to get clever) were women.
Re: (Score:1)
The programmers were all men.
NO. The programmers - well the main 6 ENIAC ones - were all women, as you can see in any number of reference sources. The men were primarily off fighting the war. Also, before programming was really a field, the hand-calculations were all done by women with math degrees, so they naturally transitioned into being some of the earliest programmers.
No idea how you are at +2 for that drivel. I guess reality doesn't count for much on /. anymore.
Re: Only women? (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary seems pretty clear then.
All six primary programmers were women. There were probably dozens of other who dabbled, but if you were to select THE six programmers of ENIAC, they were all women.
Re: Only women? (Score:3)
The reason women were overrepresented in early computing was because they originally performed the "low" work of computing things on paper. It was seen as secretarial, but when all of a sudden you need people to program this work into the earliest computers, the women who did the computation was the natural choice.
Re: (Score:2)
Even in areas that were all men, it was less status to be the one working on the computer itself rather than being someone who did all the work on paper or blackboard.
Re: (Score:1)
Summary implies all the programmers were women.
All the primary programmers were women, that is correct. There was a group of six, who had both the math background to understand what they were programming it for, and the smarts to figure out how to configure the machine to do it.
They also became experts in the hardware and finding problems caused by an average of one blown tube per day.
Some of that group are credited with inventing concepts such as subroutines and nesting (both were most likely independently invented in multiple places and times).
Here ar
Re: (Score:3)
There was a big war. All the men were sent to be canon fodder. The women were left at home to build things ("Rosie the Riveter"). They recruited women from local Philadelphia universities (Penn, Temple) to be "computers" (they initially did the calculations by manually but when the machine was ready, they programmed it).
Re: (Score:3)
For quite some time, programming or using a computer was seen as clerical work and so was proper and acceptable for women to do that work. Even after a computing industry grew up. And the terms "programmer", "coder", and "computer" meant very different things in the past. Ie, programmers wrote up instructions, coders actually did the work of converting to the machine's language and typing it all in, and a computer was a person who did rote mathematical calculations (how they did trajectory tables before el
Re: Why ENIAC? One of a slew. (Score:2)
Because that came years later.
Re: Why ENIAC? One of a slew. (Score:2)
And because it was never used for anything interesting like blowing up Nazis.
Something doesn't fit (Score:2)
false romantic nonsense (Score:1)
wasn't a binary computer, wasn't stored program
so, wasn't modern computer.
in fact, some earlier machines were closer to modern than that overgrown abacus that used a third more vacuum tubes than necessary to do the job
Re: (Score:2)
wasn't a binary computer, wasn't stored program
so, wasn't modern computer.
The first stored program computer was the Manchester Baby [wikipedia.org] (June 1948) and followed by Edsac [wikipedia.org] (May 1949) both built in England.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Wasn't a VonNeumann architecture machine. It was a computer.
Re: (Score:2)
yes, in the sense an abacus is a computer
Re: (Score:3)
The first Eniac wasn't a stored program computer, but it was converted into something similar to a stored program model over its lifetime (ie, it had additional instructions microprogrammed into it that replaced plug boards).
Re: (Score:2)
a kind of ROM for the function tables was added (and later was done with core RAM), but still I wouldn't call that a stored program computer. The whole thing was like an abacus that could move beads after a human set them up to do a certain specific list of functions. Earlier computers really did have stored programs.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, but it was moving in that direction but eventually it was getting too old relative to other computers. Call it a glorified calculator, but a very good calculator. Although not a stored program, the programming was somewhat similar although the final work of translating the program into the machine could take days of setting up patch cords. It was more than an abacus, though it did have ring counters with carry like an abacus. Although claiming it's like an abacus because it didn't have a stored p
Re: Wrong (Score:2)
"The Z1 contained some 30,000 metal parts and never worked well"
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Implementation is the real achievement.
Re: Wrong (Score:2)
"The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941 but was not considered vital, so it was never put into everyday operation"
Wow. What a great accomplishment. You built a box that generates warmth.
Was it more complex than the Antikythera? (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism/ [wikipedia.org]
Or just because it is as complicated. It doesn't count due to its age?
Re:Was it more complex than the Antikythera? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Yes. A general-purpose programmable machine with 18,000 vacuum tubes is more complex than a machine with a couple dozen gears that can only solve one particular problem.
Re: (Score:2)
An extraordinary orrery, but only an orrery.
Programming the ENIAC (Score:5, Interesting)
ENIAC was later adapted into a general purpose stored-program computer by wiring it permanently to form the data path of a Von Neumann machine. See https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike... [army.mil] for details.
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like it wasn't programmable so much as reconfigurable. Would it have been possible (eventually) to make it programmable using a complex enough switch? Like a phone switch?
Re: (Score:2)
Would it have been possible (eventually) to make it programmable using a complex enough switch? Like a phone switch?
The classic Von Neumann computer can be expressed as the combination of memory, data path, and control. Memory was unchanged, consisting of read/write accumulators and read-only switch panels. ENIAC's existing electronic assemblies were wired together to form the data path, but the control required new hardware. The control sequenced instructions read from the constant switches, decoded them, and then sequenced the data path to execute them. Like a phone switch, the control operated multiplexers in the data
Re: (Score:1)
Maths (Score:2)
" The Army's Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) located women math graduates from schools nearby [who] worked day and night, six days a week, calculating thousands of ballistics trajectories which were compiled into artillery firing tables and sent to soldiers in the battlefields. It was a tremendous effort. "
Indeed. Just to produce one page of data.
And it's just maths, you can't even patent the sucker.
It doesn't sound true. (Score:4, Insightful)
From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]:
> ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.[16] The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Frank Mural (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis (accumulators).[17] In 1946, the researchers resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
> ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators that could not only add and subtract, but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across several general-purpose buses (or trays, as they were called). In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer and trigger the next operation, all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations, depending on the sign of a computed result.
Are you really telling me that the people that made the machine had no idea how to programme it, not even a system in place to enable that? The OP makes it sounds like the makers just randomly built stuff and it took women (not computer scientists, or mathematicians; but women, if they'd had testicles they'd have been unable ...) to come along, decipher the randomly wired together hardware, realise it could be used as a computer, and then develop programming -- independent of any men mind you, men didn't even sweep the floors.
This whole retconning of past scientific and engineering efforts as solely performed by women is silly.
Re: (Score:2)
Lovely! Good job AC!
Clearly you stand by your remarks.
Re:It doesn't sound true. (Score:4, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Programmers
You seem to have intentionally skipped that part.
"Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were the first programmers of the ENIAC. Historians had at first mistaken them for "Refrigerator Ladies", i.e., models posing in front of the machine.[36] Most of the women did not receive recognition for their work on the ENIAC in their lifetimes.[37]"
This is the issue. These women actually programmed and used and made productive and important use of the ENIAC, and they were assumed to be models standing in front of the computer even by historians. Bringing into light efforts which were deliberately ignored and not given importance too is not retconning.
The thing about early computers is that the effort needed on the software side of it was completely underestimated. What this machine could really do was discovered when developing the software to it. Even into the 60s software development was still an emerging field where the percentage of women was higher than it is today. Where programming the hardware would be simpler and require less debugging than reality it turned out to be.
Re: (Score:3)
This is the issue. These women actually programmed and used and made productive and important use of the ENIAC
I wish these women would get nearly as much recognition as Grace Hopper got! There seems to be at least one documentary [eniacprogrammers.org] that looks pretty interesting...
Re: (Score:2)
That's still programming, software physically manifested as the wiring and switches. How the ENIAC, a general purpose computer, behaved was programmed and controlled through those wirings and switches.
These women, the early computer programmers, were pioneers on the software side computer history. And their contribution were basically ignored until more recently. What's the issue here?
And if you read the wiki pages of these women, you'll see they have had math, science and engineering backgrounds. And conti
Re: (Score:3)
ENIAC was not an assembled, general purpose computer. It was a bunch of modules that you have to build into a computer that would perform the task you wanted. So for example one module would be a register and ALU, able to do certain operations like addition and subtraction. You had to take a bunch of those, and wire them together in sequence with your various inputs and constants.
In effect to program the machine you had to build a special purpose computer for that specific task from the modules available. L
Re: (Score:2)
>You wouldn't discount Woz's work because he didn't engineer the CPU or the RAM chips, right?
The notion of an 8 bit CPU as Woz would design it is downright fascinating . . .
hawk
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine there would be an incredible number of undocumented op-codes as he optimized the cost down. Actually he would probably document them and find some way to use them in the system.
Re: (Score:1)
Woz design a hypothetical 16-bit computer called SWEET16 and then emulated it within the Apple II ROM ?
The Basic interpreter was written in SWEET16.
Nostalgia never gets old ... (Score:2)
Hobbies, technical:
...
TECHNICAL THUG: Writes entries for Obfuscated C contest. Optimizes INTERCAL scripts. Maintains ENIAC emulator. Virtual reality.
[ And for you Emacs users: M-x eniac-mode (ha, just kidding) ... ]
Never forgottten (Score:2)
I've had this signature about an ENIAC programming competition for years :)
Very first modern computer? (Score:3)
Konrad Zuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Plankalkül programming language.
The Z2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Z3 computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Z4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"... the Tale of the World's First Computer" (11.01.10)
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/... [wired.com]
It got more fun and interesting even in the US.
Re: (Score:2)
Or the ABC, from which many/most, but not all, of the "innovations" of ENIAC were drawn, eventually leading to the invalidation of patents . . .
hawk
The world's very SECOND modern computer (Score:1)
I know Americans just love re-writing history (thanks for helping us out in WW2 by cracking the Enigma code, by the way) so I guess it's no real surprise that they forget about the actual first fully electronic, programmable general purpose computer, the Colossus.
Sure, not many people knew about it at the time, because we Brits love our secrets, and so kept the invention of the modern computer classified for many years. But now its existence is known, perhaps you could stop making these silly claims that th
Getting Bent Out of Shape Over Nothing (Score:2)
I love all the misogynistic comments trying to take away from what these women accomplished. What a bunch of sad individuals who seem butt hurt over accepting the women pioneered the positions they have today.
The men at the time were off in war doing manly things like fighting in the trenches. The women at the time were back home filling up the roles of the men. So there really was no choice but for them to pick up the slack. Some of these jobs for women included mathematicians. Six of them were roped