Zahlen, bitte! The ENIAC Six: The pioneers behind the universal computer
ENIAC is considered the world's first fully electronic universal computer. It was programmed by six IT pioneers who were almost forgotten by time.
ENIAC has turned 80. The first electronic universal computer, put into operation on February 15, 1946, combines many pioneering stories related to IT. For its anniversary, we have taken the liberty of updating and republishing the story of the giant computer's almost forgotten female programmers from an older "Zahlen, bitte!". Enjoy reading!
The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was an imposing sight: the 27-ton behemoth occupied 170 square meters of floor space. Its 17,468 vacuum tubes also distinguished it from the electromechanical Zuse Z3.
While Konrad Zuse's computer was more modern in concept and already used the binary system common in today's computers, as an electromechanical device with its relays, it was completely inferior to ENIAC in terms of computing power.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 3.0 Bubba73)
Therefore, ENIAC is considered the first fully electronic universal computer. It had a power consumption that made even current gaming PCs seem like economical Raspberry Pis: at 174 kilowatts, it even made the local power suppliers in Philadelphia sweat. It is said that the streetlights flickered when the mainframe was powered up.
Manual Ballistic Calculations
But how did its development come about? It was a child of World War II. With the US entry into the war in 1942, a close integration between government agencies, industrial capacities, and the know-how of university research institutions quickly began, with the goal of improving the combat capability of military units. One thing was particularly important: computing power! To determine the ballistic trajectories of bombs and projectiles under various weather conditions, complex calculations had to be performed.
In the absence of most men fighting in Europe and the Pacific region, women with good degrees in mathematics and science found more professional opportunities that were often denied to them in peacetime, with a focus on hearth and children. They were recruited nationwide to perform calculations arising at the Ballistic Research Laboratory.
They performed these complicated calculations mostly with the support of primitive calculating machines and were called "computers" for this work. In 1945, around 80 women were engaged in this activity. However, the military needed even more computing power.
(Image:Â Gemeinfrei)
More Computing Capacity Through Electronics
Dr. John Mauchly, Herman H. Goldstine, and John Presper Eckert, all working at the University of Pennsylvania, were therefore commissioned in 1942 to develop an electronic computer that would take over the ballistics calculations. This led to the creation of ENIAC by 1946. The female programmers needed for its operation were sought from the pool of women employed at the Ballistic Research Laboratory.
The project was so secret that Goldstine had difficulty asking specific questions during the job interviews without revealing too much. The question that emerged was whether the women were afraid of electronics. At least six answered "no":
- Kathleen Mauchly Antonelli (née McNulty)
- Marilyn Meltzer (née Wescoff)
- Frances Spence (née Bilas)
- Frances Elizabeth Holberton (née Snyder)
- Ruth Teitelbaum (née Lichterman)
- Elizabeth Jean Bartik (née Jennings)
These six women were ultimately selected from the applicants to program ENIAC.
Programming Through Replugging
ENIAC was programmed by replugging the wiring of the components and using rotary switches to set the required calculation mode. Since the computer initially had no instruction memory (which also distinguished it from the Z3), this procedure was necessary every time the calculation mode was changed. The programmers had to study the circuit diagrams, as manuals simply did not exist at the time. Input was via IBM punch cards. The programming alone could take several days.
The programmers did not have an easy time: it could happen that the developers presented the computer to other gentlemen in the evening, who then tinkered with the device and altered its settings, so that the programming had to be restored to its original state in the morning. Hardware troubleshooting was also time-consuming, as the vacuum tubes frequently failed, impairing the accuracy of the calculations. The creators countered this by, on the one hand, dimensioning the tubes larger than strictly necessary, and on the other hand, not shutting down the computer. For the military, uninterrupted calculations were more important than the electricity bill. The reward was computing power: 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications, or 38 divisions per second were outstanding at the time.
The six female programmers tamed a computer with the following specifications:
- 40 parallel processing components
- approx. 170 m2 space requirement
- approx. 1,500 relays
- approx. 7,200 diodes
- 17,468 vacuum tubes
- approx. 10,000 capacitors
- approx 27,000 kilos in weight
- approx 70,000 resistors
- built in approx 200,000 man-hours by 50 developers
- $486,802.22 (equivalent to over $6,800,000 today)
- approx. 5,000,000 manually soldered points
Since the computer was only completed six months after the end of the war, priorities shifted in the emerging Cold War: calculations for nuclear weapons were now in demand. Stanley P. Frankel and Nicholaus Metropolis, both collaborators in nuclear weapons research under J. Robert Oppenheimer, joined ENIAC to perform calculations related to hydrogen bombs.
With the experience and skill of the programmers, these initial tests were successfully mastered, so that on February 14, 1946, ENIAC was presented to the public as a "superbrain," which was supposed to reduce the time required for manual calculations from 20 hours to just 30 seconds by computer calculation. The presentation, of course, took place without a precise mention of the research purpose.
Further Development and Relocation
In 1947, ENIAC was revised and moved from the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the US Army's oldest research and development center. There, calculations continued under a newly formed programming team. However, on October 2, 1955, it was definitively shut down.
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Technological progress in the form of further developments, such as the first commercial computer UNIVAC, and enormous costs made ENIAC obsolete. Furthermore, in 1973, a lawsuit invalidated the patent granted for the computer in 1947. John W. Mauchly was accused of idea theft because he had access to the Atanasoff-Berry Computer before the ENIAC development, which conceptually anticipated some developments.
Forgotten Pioneers
The ENIAC programmers, on the other hand, were completely forgotten. Even at the presentation of the mainframe, they were not mentioned at all. It probably would have remained that way if Kathy Kleiman, then a student at Harvard University, had not stumbled upon the women in the ENIAC pictures during her research in 1986. But their names were nowhere to be found. When she inquired, she was told they were probably models – which she, given the pictures and the professional-looking gestures, did not want to believe.
At the ceremony for ENIAC's 40th anniversary, she overheard a group of older ladies discussing technical matters – the said programmers. With persistence and conviction, she brought these women and their pioneering achievements to public attention. Better late than never, in 1997, the programmers were inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame by the Women in Technology International association for their achievements as the ENIAC programming team.
(Image:Â CC BY 2.0, Michael Hicks)
For ENIAC's 80th anniversary, WDR produced a "Zeitzeichen" (Sign of the Times) in honor of the "Original Six": Katy Kleiman, now a professor of internet legislation at American University in Washington, describes the difficult conditions under which the programmers had to work.
ENIAC itself now only exists in museums: Since 1996, at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn, one can get an impression of ENIAC's dimensions with some original parts from the dimensions of ENIAC.
In 2011, ENIAC at least got its own X account ENIAC, but has not been active since 2021 and slept through its own anniversary. Perhaps the electricity costs were too high again, or no more vacuum tubes could be found... But of course, ENIAC can also be simulated.
Incidentally, ENIAC not only influenced the computer world technologically but also early activated the developer gene for peculiar acronyms. Because after ENIAC came UNIVAC, EDVAC, JOHNNIAC, ILLIAC, and... inevitably, MANIAC.
(mawi)
