The Fall 1996 special issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing concentrated on "Women in Computing" and we have chosen to take this opportunity, in the same issue of Computing that celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Computer Society, to celebrate the contributions of women in this monthly column. Women have been overlooked throughout much of our history perhaps because their names are not frequently associated with innovations that are in common use today. Grace Murray Hopper's name is not, for example, associated with the programming language compiler, but Herbert Grosch's name is associated with the law relating computer performance and cost. While there are ideas or contributions that were originated by women, many of the early women served the industry by operating the early machines, by suggesting improvements, and by debugging them.
It is generally acknowledged that the first woman in computing was Ada King (nee Byron), Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), who overcame Charles Babbage inability to adequately communicate his ideas by translating an Italian account of his Analytical Engine back into English. She then added her own notes based on her knowledge of Babbage's work. To Ada we must attribute the idea of a loop in a program which she likened to a "snake biting its tail". More than a hundred years later Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) joined the staff of the Harvard Computation Center in 1944 as a US Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) to become (in her words) "the third programmer on the first large scale digital computer, [Harvard] Mark I." In 1945 on a summer day, working in a World War I temporary building not equipped with air conditioning, the Harvard Mark II computer stopped. After some searching Grace discovered a moth beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. After extracting the moth and taping it into the machine log-book, she reported, using a euphemism originated by Thomas Edison, that she had "debugged the computer".[1] For the next forty years "Amazing Grace" bugged the computer establishment to progress out of the "dark ages" of computing, and backed up her aspirations with technological innovations that showed the world about the possibilities of the next generation of computers.
During the last two years of World War II, the British Foreign Office operated a code breaking activity at Bletchley Park about 40 miles outside of London. There under the leadership of Max Newman, and with the genius of Alan M. Turing, the Telephone Research Establishment (TRE) of the General Post Office built a series of machines that were known locally as the Colossus. While Colossus has a claim to primarity as the first electronic special purpose computer, it was preceded by a number of other mechanical machines known as "Bombes" and "Robinsons" that also assisted in code breaking. All these machines were operated by members of the Womens Royal Naval Service (WRNS, pronounced "wrens") who followed the programs developed by the "boffins" to discover the encryption machine settings to decode enemy military intercepts. On then other side of the Atlantic, a group of WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) were involved in the US project in codebreaking. The WAVES were employed at the NCR plant in Dayton, Ohio, wiring the US versions of the Bletchley Park Bombes, and later in Washington DC in the operation of those same machines. Only in 1995 did these women of NCR have their first reunion (at the Wright Patterson AFB) after the Clinton administration lifted a portion of the curtain of secrecy on their work.
As the ENIAC was coming on-line at the end of World War II at the Moore School of the University of Philadelphia, much of the work of computing the firing tables for new artillery guns was being completed still by approximately 100 women equipped with electric calculators - and they were known as "computers"! From that group six "programmers" were recruited who would become the nucleus of the operating staff of the ENIAC and who would essentially make it all work. Easier to identify individually than the hundreds of WRNS and WAVES, the six original programmers of the world's first general purpose, large scale electronic computer were Kathleen McNulty (Mauchly Antonelli), Frances Bilas (Spence), Betty Jean Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder (Holberton), Ruth Lichterman, and Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer). Also involved were the wives of John Mauchly and Herman Goldstine, Mary Mauchly and Adele Goldstine respectively, who were also "computers". Betty Holberton stayed in the industry until the 1990s, giving Grace Hopper the idea for the compiler through her 1952 development of a sort-merge generator which may have been the first useful program that had the capability of generating other programs for the UNIVAC I. Betty was also involved in the development of COBOL in 1960.
In the six-person team that developed the first commercial compiler and the first effective programming language FORTRAN was Lois Haibt. Straight out of college with a degree in mathematics, Haibt probably knew as much about compilation as anyone else and she was able to build the arithmetic expression analyzer, the very core of the FORTRAN compiler. In keeping with our monthly theme, we note that the first FORTRAN reference manual was released on October 15, 1956, preceding the release of the first compiler by six months. Only 60 pages long, that first programming language manual had large print and wide margins. By today's standards, the first FORTRAN was minuscule.
Women have been involved in computing since its inception, and though the proportion of women in the field (about 13%) is far less than are to be found in our society, they still have a strong impact on our industry. The column could easily be filled with just the names of the women who have contributed to the field of computing, but most of them are still unknown, overshadowed by the myriad male innovators and often by their husbands.
Returning to our monthly theme in this special issue of Computer celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Computer Society, October 14 is the 39th anniversary of the British Computer Society , founded in 1957. BCS is one of several international societies that have an affiliate membership relationship with the Computer Society. Next month at the Supercomputer '96 conference in Pittsburgh, the Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery will share a celebration of their overlapping 50th anniversary years.
This same month in 1962 Purdue University formed the first "formal" computer science department and initiated the first computer science degree program. The first courses related to computer science were offered by Howard Aiken at Harvard University in the late 1940s. In various forms computer science had been taught at many universities prior to 1962, but students actually received degrees in other disciplines, quite frequently applied mathematics or electrical engineering. The first Ph.D. in computer science was awarded in 1965 to Richard Wexelblat by the University of Pennsylvania. We have no records of early bachelor's or master's degrees in the field.
October Birthdays:
John Vincent Atanasoff was born 4 October 1903, in Hamilton NY and died 15 June 1995 in New Market, MD, one of three of our major pioneers to die in 1995. He was the 1937 inventor of the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) with Clifford Berry at Iowa State College, a predecessor of the 1942 ENIAC. It was a serial, binary, electromechanical, digital, special purpose computer with regenerative memory. The Computer Society awarded Atanasoff the Pioneer Award in 1984 for his work on the "First Electronic Computer with Serial Memory".
Born in Duluth, Minn., Arthur Walter Burks celebrates his birthday on 13 October 1915. Burks was one of the principal designers of the ENIAC, working with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. Later with Herman H. Goldstine, he helped John von Neumann develop the logical design of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) computer - the von Neumann architecture. He received the Pioneer Award in 1982.
Detmold, Germany was the birthplace of Werner Buchholz, born 24 October 1922. As a member of the IBM 701 and 7030 (STRETCH) design teams he was a prolific documenter of those early designs and the originator of the term "byte".. Buchholz received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1990.
Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff (born 28 October 1937, Rochester NY) is credited with the invention of the computer on a chip, a solution to the problem of creating a hand-held calculator with the minimum number of chips. The computer on a chip was implemented by Federico Faggin (born 1 December 1941, in Vicenza, Italy). Hoff received the Pioneer Award in 1988 and Faggin the W. Wallace McDowell Award in 1994.
[1] The stories of the original finding of the computer bug by Grace Hopper, and the use of the term "Bug" by Thomas Edison in 1878 are to be found in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol 10. No. 4, pp. 341-342.
