Women in the History of Computing Technology

Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer was another original programmer of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

Marlyn Wescoff graduates from Temple University with a major in social studies and English and a minor in business in 1942. Shortly after her graduation, she starts working at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. What helps her get a position there, however, is not her degree but her knowledge of how to operate an adding machine. Marlyn’s initial work involves performing weather calculations. In 1943, the U.S. Army hires her to join a group of women whose main job is to compute ballistics trajectories used primarily for artillery firing tables. Along with ten other “girls” and four men, she conducts her work in a large classroom at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the same place where later the ENIAC computer itself is built and further operated until December, 1946.

In 1945, Marlyn is selected to become part of the first team of programmers to operate and program the ENIAC. Initially, the machine is part of a classified project and, therefore, she and her co-workers are not allowed to enter the room where it is located. Instead, they are given access to different blueprints they can use to develop programs while working in an adjacent room. The programming itself involves discretizing the differential equations involved in a ballistic trajectory problem to the precision allowed by the ENIAC and calculating the path to the appropriate bank of electronics in parallel progression, with each separate instruction having to reach the correct location in time to within 1/5,000th of a second. After working out a program on paper, the women are allowed to enter the ENIAC room and actually program the machine.

In 1947, shortly before the ENIAC computer itself is moved to the Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Ballistics Research Laboratory, Marlyn Wescoff resigns her job at the Moore School to get married. In 1997, along with the other five original ENIAC programmers (Katheleen McNulty Antonelli, Betty Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman), she is inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

Sources

The information presented above is taken from the following online sources:

• -- Marlyn Meltzer (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)
• -- ENIAC (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)
• -- The Decline of Women in Computer Science from 1940-1982 (Knol, A Unit of Knowledge)