CITP Seminar: Kathy Kleiman – Author of Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer
During World War II, the Army hired women to hand-calculate ballistics trajectories for artillery firing tables. But these differential calculus equations took over 2 dozen hours by hand, and the Army needed thousands of them. In an attempt to speed up the calculations, the Army agreed to fund the creation of a truly experimental machine – the world’s first all-electronic, general-purpose, programmable computer with 18,000 vacuum tubes. When the huge Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) surprisingly worked, the Army selected women mathematicians to program it to compute the b...
Source: princeton.edu