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Computer, Vol. 29, No. 10, October 1996

The fall 1996 special issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing focused on women in computing. Women's contributions have often been overlooked, perhaps because their names are seldom associated with innovations in common use today. For example, Grace Murray Hopper's name isn't associated with the programming language compiler, but Herbert Grosch's name is associated with the law relating computer performance and cost. In addition to contributing original ideas, many women in computing's early days suggested improvements as they operated and sometimes debugged the machines.

By general acknowledgment, the first woman in computing was Ada King (nee Gordon), Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852). Discovering that Charles Babbage could not adequately communicate his ideas, she translated an Italian account of his Analytical Engine back into English, adding her own notes. To Ada we attribute the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a "snake biting its tail."

More than a century 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." On a summer day in 1945, in a World War I "temporary" building without air conditioning, the Harvard Mark II stopped. Hopper discovered a moth beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. After extracting the moth and taping it into the machine's logbook, she reported-using a euphemism originated by Thomas Edison-that she had "debugged the computer." For the next 40 years "Amazing Grace" bugged the computer establishment to move out of the dark ages of computing, suggesting technological innovations that led to the next generation of computers.

Toward the end of World War II, the British Foreign Office operated a code-breaking activity at Bletchley Park, about 40 miles from London. There, under the leadership of Max Newman, and with the genius of Alan M. Turing, the Telephone Research Establishment of the General Post Office built a series of machines known locally as the Colossus. While many consider Colossus the first electronic special-purpose computer, it was in fact preceded by several other mechanical machines known as "Bombes" and "Robinsons" that also assisted in code breaking. All these machines were operated by members of the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS, pronounced "wrens"), who followed programs developed to discover the encryption machine settings to decode enemy military intercepts. Across the Atlantic a group of WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) were involved in the US code-breaking project. The WAVES worked at the NCR plant in Dayton, Ohio, wiring the US versions of the Bletchley Park Bombes, and later in Washington, D.C., operating those same machines. Only in 1995 did these WAVES have their first reunion (at the Wright Patterson AFB), after the Clinton administration partially lifted 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, approximately 100 women equipped with electric calculators and known as "computers" were computing the firing tables for new artillery guns. From that group, six "programmers" were recruited to become the nucleus of the ENIAC operating staff and essentially make it all work. 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, Betty Snyder (Holberton), Ruth Lichterman, and Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer). The wives of John Mauchly and Herman Goldstine-Mary Mauchly and Adele Goldstine-were also "computers." Betty Holberton stayed in the industry until the 1990s. Her 1952 development of a sort-merge generator, possibly the first useful program capable of generating other programs for Univac I, gave Grace Hopper the idea for the compiler. Holberton was also involved in the 1960 development of Cobol.

The six-person team that developed the first commercial compiler and the first effective programming language, Fortran, included Lois Haibt. Straight out of college with a degree in mathematics, Haibt probably knew as much about compilation as anyone, and she was able to build the arithmetic expression analyzer, the very core of the Fortran compiler. The first Fortran reference manual was released on October 15, 1956, six months before the first compiler's release. Only 60 pages long, with large print and wide margins, that first programming-language manual was minuscule by today's standards.

Though involved in computing since its inception, women constitute only about 13 percent of computer professionals. Nevertheless, they have a strong impact on our industry. This column might 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.

October milestones

In October 1962 Purdue University formed the first formal computer science department and initiated the first computer-science degree program. Courses related to computer science had been offered by Howard Aiken at Harvard University in the late 1940s, and computer science had been taught in various forms at many universities prior to 1962, but students typically received degrees in such disciplines as applied mathematics or electrical engineering. The first PhD in computer science was awarded in 1965 to Richard Wexelbla by the University of Pennsylvania.

October birthdays

Arthur Walter Burks, who was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1915, celebrates his birthday on October 13. Burks was a principal ENIAC designer, 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 Computer Pioneer Award in 1982.

Werner Buchholz, born October 24, 1922, in Detmold, Germany, was on the IBM 701 and 7030 (Stretch) design teams. A prolific documenter of those early designs and originator of the term "byte," Buchholz received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1990.

Marcian E. (Ted) Hoff, born October 28, 1937, in Rochester, New York, invented the computer on a chip, solving the problem of creating a hand-held calculator with a minimum number of chips. Frederico Faggin implemented the computer on a chip. Hoff received the Computer Pioneer Award in 1988 and Faggin the W. Wallace McDowell Award in 1994.

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