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