Proving Ground
The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer
-
- ¥1,900
発行者による作品情報
As the Cold War began, America’s race for tech supremacy was taking off. Experts rushed to complete the top-secret computing research started during World War II, among them six gifted mathematicians: a patriotic Quaker, a Jewish bookworm, a Yugoslav genius, a native Gaelic speaker, a sophomore from the Bronx, and a farmer’s daughter from Missouri. Their mission? Programming the world’s first and only supercomputer—before any code or programming languages existed.
These pioneers triumphed against sexist attitudes and huge technical challenges to invent computer programming, yet their monumental contribution has never been recognised—until now. Over a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded their stories. Here, with a light touch and a serious mind, she exposes the deliberate erasure of their achievements and restores the women to their rightful place as revolutionaries, bringing to life their camaraderie, their determination, and their rapidly changing world.
As big tech struggles with gender inequality and momentum builds in restoring women to history, the time has come for this engrossing story to be uncovered and celebrated.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
