TechIntersect

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day I would like to tell you about Jean Jennings Bartik. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Bartik a few years ago when she was speaking at a CCSC computing conference at her alma mater, Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri, USA.

Bartik was one of the world’s very first computer programmers— she worked on the original digital computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).

Programmers Betty Jean Jennings (Bartik) (left) and Fran Bilas (right) operate the ENIAC’s main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army photo from the archives of the ARL Technical Library)

The word “computer” originally was not about a machine, it was a job title for a human being. “Betty” Jean Jennings Bartik was hired as a human “computer” by the US Army after graduating in 1945 from Northwest Missouri State Teachers college. Her major was Mathematics, which at the time was an unusual choice for women. She was the only female graduate in Math from the college that year.

Her first job with the Army was computing ballistic range tables for artillery guns. (When I was a Navy Firecontrolman, I had first hand exposure to such range tables. Here’s an example range table for  5″/38 guns like we had on the Battleship Missouri.) Imagine a large telephone book sized document listing all of the possibilities for where a projectile would land with a given initial velocity and a particular angle of elevation. Each calculation was made by hand, since there were no calculators or computer spreadsheets to help do the Math. Day after day, recording page after page of these numbers, that was the sort of tedious work she did for the Army.

She found the work quite monotonous and uninteresting, which is why she jumped at the opportunity to work for a new “secret” government project without knowing exactly what she would be doing. So that is how the girl from Missouri wound up becoming one of the world’s first computer programmers. Instead of doing the ballistics calculations by hand, she would be working with the team learning to use the new ENIAC computer which would ultimately do the same job a thousand times faster than a human computer could. According to the January 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM:

There were no manuals or instruction guides for programming the ENIAC, which included 17,468 vacuum tubes, occupied more than 680 square feet, and weighed 30 tons. Instead, Bartik and her five female colleagues—Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Betty Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum—pored over its logical and electrical block diagrams and discussed design details with the male engineers and physicists who had created them. Ultimately, the women figured out how to set ENIAC’s 3,000 switches and hundreds of connection cables so calculations would progress correctly
through the complex machine.

That’s right. No manuals or instructions; not even a keyboard, not even punch cards! The machines instructions were hardware encoded directly into the circuitry with switches and cables. English-like computer programming languages would come later thanks in no small part to the efforts of another female computing pioneer (and fellow Navy veteran) Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.

Jean also later worked on the BINAC and the UNIVAC computers. In 1997, Jean and her fellow programmers were inducted into the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame. Jean was given an honorary doctorate from Northwest Missouri State University in 2002.

I remember enjoying her talk very much, she has a great sense of humor, and just tells it like it is. When I had the chance to meet Jean Bartik briefly and get her autograph, I told here about my Navy gunnery experience, and that I’m a college computing teacher. Knowing I am a professor, she wrote to me this very funny note:

Teach women that it is fun. I mean Math and Science. – Jean J. Bartik

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