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

by Kathy Kleiman
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

by Kathy Kleiman

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Overview

Discover a fascinating look into the lives of six historic trailblazers in this World War II-era story of the American women who programmed the world's first modern computer.

After the end of World War II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, 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—better known as the ENIAC—even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. While most students of computer history are aware of this innovative machine, the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told—until now. 

Over the course of a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded extensive interviews with the women about their work. Proving Ground 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781538718292
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication date: 07/25/2023
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 214,727
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Kathy Kleiman is a leader in Internet law and policy and currently teaches at American University Washington College of Law. Her passion for finding the truth behind these female programmers led to her founding the ENIAC Programmers Project, which completed a documentary on the subject of this book titled "The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers." The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2014 and won the UNAFF Grand Jury Award For Best Short Documentary at the United Nations Association Film Festival in 2016.  
 

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters ix

Preface xv

The Double Doors Open 1

Looking for Women Math Majors 5

We Were Strangers There 19

Nestled in a Corner of the Base 25

Give Other People as Much Credit as You Give Yourself 31

We Found Things in a Not Very Good State 40

Adding Machines and Radar 43

3436 Walnut Street 52

The Monster in the Basement 63

The Lost Memo 68

"Give Goldstine the Money" 76

Dark Days of the War 79

"All That Machinery just to Do One Little Thing Like That" 83

The Kissing Bridge 89

Are You Scared of Electricity? 99

Learning It Her Way 105

Surrounded by Vultures 114

The Dean's Antechamber 118

A New Project 124

Divide and Conquer 129

A Sequencing of the Problem 137

A Tremendously Big Thing 141

Programs and Pedaling Sheets 147

Bench Tests and Best Friends 152

Parallel Programming 155

Sines and Cosines 159

The ENIAC Room Is Theirs! 165

The Last Bugs Before Demonstration Day 172

Demonstration Day, February 15, 1946 175

A Strange Afterparty 184

Hundred-Year Problems and Programmers Needed 189

The Moore School Lectures 194

Their Own Adventures 198

ENIAC 5 in and around Aberdeen 204

A New Life 214

Epilogue 221

Postscript 233

Endnotes 245

Selected Bibliography 273

Acknowledgments 281

Index 287

About the Author 297

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