Unsung innovators: Jean Bartik, ENIAC programmer
Computerworld -
Jean Bartik, born Betty Jean Jennings in rural Missouri in 1924 and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, always dreamed of getting out of the Midwest and having a real adventure in the world.
She lived her dream, as it turns out. Bartik was one of six women responsible for programming the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a giant of a machine charged with calculating bullet trajectories during World War II.
Bartik was also the implementer of the first stored-program computer. She helped ENIAC use its function tables to store a programmed instruction set as read-only memory in firmware. Later, she worked on a follow-on computer, UNIVAC, that could store programs in memory. UNIVAC was the first commercially sold computer.
Bartik was a freshman at Northwest Missouri Teachers College majoring in math in 1941, the year Pearl Harbor was bombed. Suddenly, the school was emptied of its male students, who either had been drafted for the war or enlisted for the cause.
Sailors got sent into the school for officers' training, "and suddenly I found myself in math classes with a bunch of sailors," she says. "I'd be the only woman and civilian in the class. You could imagine I got a lot of attention!"

Jean Bartik, ENIAC programmer
Turns out that the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground had a project, was seeking female math majors. Bartik applied and got hired as a so-called computer -- an employee who calculated bullet trajectories by hand on what were state-of-the-art mathematical calculators at the time.
Jean Bartik
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