Proving ground : the untold story of the six women who programmed the world's first modern computer

Proving ground The untold story of the six women who programmed the world's first modern computer

Kathy Kleiman

Book - 2022

"After the end of World War II, top-secret research continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer - a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in twenty seconds rather than forty hours by human hand - even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. But their story, never told to the reporters and scientists who thronged the huge computer after it became public, was lost. Kathy Kleiman, through meticulous research and vivid prose, brings these women back to life, an...d back into the historical record. For more than two decades, she met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers, poured over documentation and images, and recorded extensive oral histories with the women about their work. She found stories that had been relegated and dismissed by even computer history experts, who had assumed the women in the old black-and-white pictures with ENIAC were nothing more than models. PROVING GROUND is a character-driven narrative that restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC Programmers' groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before, and PROVING GROUND is the celebration they deserve"--

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Subjects
Women computer programmers > United States > Biography.
Computer programmers > United States > Biography.
ENIAC (Computer)
Biographies.
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York : Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Kathy Kleiman (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xix, 296 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-280) and index.
ISBN
9781538718285
  • Cast of Characters
  • Preface
  • The Double Doors Open
  • Looking for Women Math Majors
  • We Were Strangers There
  • Nestled in a Corner of the Base
  • Give Other People as Much Credit as You Give Yourself
  • We Found Things in a Not Very Good State
  • Adding Machines and Radar
  • 3436 Walnut Street
  • The Monster in the Basement
  • The Lost Memo
  • "Give Goldstine the Money"
  • Dark Days of the War
  • "All That Machinery just to Do One Little Thing Like That"
  • The Kissing Bridge
  • Are You Scared of Electricity?
  • Learning It Her Way
  • Surrounded by Vultures
  • The Dean's Antechamber
  • A New Project
  • Divide and Conquer
  • A Sequencing of the Problem
  • A Tremendously Big Thing
  • Programs and Pedaling Sheets
  • Bench Tests and Best Friends
  • Parallel Programming
  • Sines and Cosines
  • The ENIAC Room Is Theirs!
  • The Last Bugs Before Demonstration Day
  • Demonstration Day, February 15, 1946
  • A Strange Afterparty
  • Hundred-Year Problems and Programmers Needed
  • The Moore School Lectures
  • Their Own Adventures
  • ENIAC 5 in and around Aberdeen
  • A New Life
  • Epilogue
  • Postscript
  • Endnotes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
  • About the Author
Review by Booklist Review

In the history of computer programming, stories of women's contributions are frequently untold. Kleiman spotlights one such gap in programming history here. During and after WWII, six women--Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, and Betty Jean Jennings--used mathematical skill and innovation to program early computing technology. They faced sexism in their jobs and were made to learn new pieces of technology via blueprints before being allowed to interact with the equipment itself. Kleiman excels at capturing the pressures of working in technology during a highly stressful period in history, particularly when the results of technological trials directly impacted war efforts. At times, the focus of the narrative strays from the women, to a slight detriment of the book's intention. However, the inclusion of direct interviews with the women and the clear passion for their stories make Proving Ground a needed and welcome addition to the shelves of computer history.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Law professor Kleiman recounts in her fantastic debut the vital but overlooked role six women played in the history of computers. While researching computer programming, Kleiman came across photos of unidentified women working on the ENIAC, "the world's first all-electronic, programmable, general-purpose computer" built at the University of Pennsylvania during WWII. Unconvinced by a museum director's suggestion that they were models, she dug deeper and uncovered their role in ENIAC's development. In 1942, with the US having joined WWII and men in short supply, the Army hired young women with math backgrounds to program ENIAC to calculate missile trajectories. With no manuals to aid them, Frances Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, Betty Jean Jennings, Kathleen McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman took the job. Despite harassment and discriminatory treatment (they were classified SP, for "subprofessional and subscientific"), they persevered, and with their success opened up an "electronic computing revolution" that some "would soon call... the birth of the Information Age," Kleiman writes. Kleiman has a novelist's gift for crafting a page-turning narrative, and the one on offer is both revelatory and inspiring. Fans of Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe and Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures are in for a treat. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Following A Thousand Ships, which was short-listed for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction and a best seller in the United States, Haynes's Pandora's Jar belongs to a growing number of titles that put the female characters of Greek mythology front and center as less passive or secondary than they've been regarded (25,000-copy hardcover and 30,000-copy paperback first printing)

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A group biography of the women who "pioneered ways to communicate" with "the mainframe computers that dominated computer history in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s." Kleiman, who teaches internet law at American University Washington College of Law, was inspired to write this book after discovering a mysterious black-and-white photograph in Harvard's Lamont Library. During her subsequent research and interviews, she learned the story of the six women who helped program the first modern computer, a story that was missing from the history of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. "It is up to oral histories to fill in the gaps and share the important stories and lives left out," she writes. In an engaging narrative in the vein of Hidden Figures, Kleiman shares the background of each of these women as well as how they became a part of a secret U.S. Army project. During World War II, the Army hoped to increase the accuracy of its artillery, and the desktop calculators used to calculate missile trajectories were too slow. "On average," writes the author, "it took about thirty hours to calculate a trajectory using a desktop calculator." As the Army's arsenal increased, it required new firing tables and needed faster calculations. Many believed the ENIAC was the answer. Due to their educational backgrounds and experience calculating missile trajectories using the standard method, these women were asked to participate in the programming of the ENIAC. Because many men were in battle, "the war greatly expanded opportunities for college-educated women with backgrounds in engineering, science, and math." As the author shows, despite their skills, the women still faced discrimination. In fact, in attempting to tell their stories, Kleiman received "discriminatory pushback" herself, including being accused of writing "revisionist history." She persisted, however, and achieved her goal of restoring these women to their rightful place in computer history. The author includes a helpful five-page cast of characters. An important and inspiring little-known narrative in modern computing history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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