Women in the History of Computing Technology

Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum was one of the six original programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

Ruth Lichterman was born in 1924. She graduates from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. Shortly after her graduation, she is hired by the U.S. Army 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, University of Pennsylvania; the same place where the ENIAC computer itself is built and further operated until December, 1946.

Ruth’s excellent performance at the Moore School does not remain unnoticed. She 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, the ENIAC computer is moved to the Aberdeen Proving Ground’s Ballistics Research Laboratory and Ruth Lichterman, along with Kay McNulty and Frances Bilas, other pioneer programmers, is transferred there in order to continue working on it. She remains in Aberdeen for two years in order to train the next group of ENIAC programmers and then resigns.

In 1997, along with the other five original ENIAC programmers (Katheleen McNulty Antonelli, Betty Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Bilas Spence, and Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer), she is inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum dies in Dallas, Texas in 1986.

Sources

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

• -- Ruth Teitelbaum (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)
• -- ENIAC (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)