4 ms·

Kay Mauchly and ENIAC: Girl figures out how to program giant computer [video]

19 points by quickfox 11y ago

BWStearns 11y ago
It's wild to hear the sentence "the divider/square rooter was't up yet", referring to a physical panel. Then the next sentence basically points out that there's no documentation or reference work of any kind period. Those were seriously walking-to-school-uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow times. It's sad that history didn't give the IAS/Princeton girls more credit on the first pass, though it's good that that seems to be changing.
reidman 11y ago
Why refer to these women as 'girls'? It'd certainly stick out if anyone said that a bunch of 'boys' had learned to program a computer – it would be implied/assumed that children were doing the programming.
- sdegutis 11y ago
  I've always associated the word "girl" more with gender than age, so it's very natural for me to refer to a woman as a "girl" when talking to someone informally. On the other hand, in my mind "boy" has a strong association with with age as well as gender, but "guy" doesn't. So "guys" and "girls" are my generic go-to words when referring to someone's gender without regard to their age. I'm guessing I'm probably not an oddity, since I acquired these associations while growing up with mainstream media like most people.
  - michaelcampbell 11y ago
    I'm much the same, but it drives my wife insane. "I work with a girl..." "WOMAN", "... yeah... that <insert some awesome thing here>..."
  - tamana 11y ago
    The words are ambiguous and overlap with a lot of sexist and even racist (calling all Black men "boy") behaviors, so it is unclear sometimes if a particular usage is sexist
- slavik81 11y ago
  Is that something specific to this particular story? When the police chief says "the boys down in ballistics have their hands full with the shootout last night" we don't assume he's talking about children.
  - reidman 11y ago
    Sure, but the title of this is "Girl figures out how to program giant computer". "The boy down in ballistics got in a shootout" is not something our hypothetical police chief would say. The title also implies some level of surprise that 'girl' 'figured out' this 'giant computer'. It might seem like a nitpick, but stuff like this adds up. I used to call women 'girls' occasionally, but I stopped when I realized that I'd rarely use 'boy' if the gender was flipped.
    - slavik81 11y ago
      > The title also implies some level of surprise that 'girl' 'figured out' this 'giant computer'. That's a good point. There was something about this title that I didn't like, but I wasn't really sure what it was. That may be it.
gravypod 11y ago
Since when is any of this news? Almost every early computing project had women on the staff.
- icebraining 11y ago
  HN is not just for news.
AlbertoGP 11y ago
I didn't know about her; the Wikipedia entry is at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli In another page she talks at length about her life: https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty... The rest of the comment is quotes from that page because it's quite long but I found it very interesting: The Differential Analyzer room was marked as a “Restricted” area and the door to it was kept locked. It was also the only air-conditioned room in the Moore School. It was air conditioned to maintain a constant temperature so the Analyzer hardware would not be affected by temperature changes because metal expands and contracts as the temperature goes up and down. I’m not sure how restricted the analyzer room was the first summer I was there, the summer of 1942, because it was ungodly hot that summer and the professors would come down and use the room for meetings. Pres Eckert and a group of engineers were working on the roof of the Moore School under a contract with MIT. It was for radar studies. It was hot, they were all in shorts except Pres, and they would come in the Analyzer room to cool off. [...] The ENIAC had a feature that helped test a program as well as the hardware. It could be set to run at full speed, 100,000 cycles/pulses per second. Or it could be set to run one-add time at a time. There were 20 pulses in an add-time so it stopped at every 20 pulses. Or it could be set to run one pulse at a time. This gave the operator the chance to look at the state of the machine at these various intervals to determine just when an error had occurred. These controls were mounted on a small unit that could be held in the hand. It was attached to a flexible cable so it was a remote control. As operators, our job was to track down where an error had occurred. Once we found out which tube was malfunctioning it was up to the maintenance man, either Homer Spence or Goldstein, an army corporal, to replace the failing unit. [...] The worst thing that happened to John was the security clearance problem. It started in 1949. That was when they were building the Binac. When the notice of his denial of clearance came in, Mr. Straus was still alive. He said that he knew Hoover personally and he would get it cleared up. The company was not doing any work that involved security devices, they were just building computers. Straus did get it cleared up. It was strange that each time his security was questioned, it came from the Philadelphia Ordnance Department. When I got John’s FBI file, it didn’t tell me where the information came from. But, it always came from Philadelphia. It was so persistent.. This file shows that John was a subscriber to Consumer Reports which was declared communist oriented. Also, it shows him as a member of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists. John declared that he never joined such an organization The only thing he could figure out was that he may have put his name on a list for literature at some time and they took that as joining. He was also accused of hiring security risks, such as Bob Shaw. Bob was a brilliant engineer and an albino with very limited eyesight. Bob owned a car. He could not see well enough to drive so he had various friends chauffeur him around. One time, one of his friends asked to borrow the car to drive to Washington, D. C. The friend drove it to Washington on a weekend when there was a parade that was considered pinko-oriented. Bob’s car was parked on the street while the chauffeur visited a friend. The police went along the street writing down license plate numbers. They traced the car to Bob. Bob wasn’t even there. Bob was also cited as getting various organization newsletters. [...] All the years I gave talks about the ENIAC, I always talked about it as John’s story, not my story. Although I mentioned that I had been an ENIAC Programmer, it was just in passing. [...] The only thing that I really regret is that Pres and I did not write our book about the ENIAC, EDVAC and Univac. Pres was always very angry about the lies that were told and copied from one book to the next, He said that they could go ahead and write their books, but he and I would write one telling the real story. [...] Somehow, we were wrapped up in our lives and never got around to writing the book. If I am remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as my family storyteller. It has been a great life.
basicplus2 11y ago
it comes across as pretty patronising to me... it sounds like all women don't really get any more mature than when they get to something like 13 years old... I can understand why women get steamed up over things like this.

19 points by quickfox 11y ago

It's wild to hear the sentence "the divider/square rooter was't up yet", referring to a physical panel. Then the next sentence basically points out that there's no documentation or reference work of any kind period. Those were seriously walking-to-school-uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow times. It's sad that history didn't give the IAS/Princeton girls more credit on the first pass, though it's good that that seems to be changing.

reidman 11y ago

Why refer to these women as 'girls'? It'd certainly stick out if anyone said that a bunch of 'boys' had learned to program a computer – it would be implied/assumed that children were doing the programming.

sdegutis 11y ago
I've always associated the word "girl" more with gender than age, so it's very natural for me to refer to a woman as a "girl" when talking to someone informally. On the other hand, in my mind "boy" has a strong association with with age as well as gender, but "guy" doesn't. So "guys" and "girls" are my generic go-to words when referring to someone's gender without regard to their age. I'm guessing I'm probably not an oddity, since I acquired these associations while growing up with mainstream media like most people.
- michaelcampbell 11y ago
  I'm much the same, but it drives my wife insane. "I work with a girl..." "WOMAN", "... yeah... that <insert some awesome thing here>..."
- tamana 11y ago
  The words are ambiguous and overlap with a lot of sexist and even racist (calling all Black men "boy") behaviors, so it is unclear sometimes if a particular usage is sexist
slavik81 11y ago
Is that something specific to this particular story? When the police chief says "the boys down in ballistics have their hands full with the shootout last night" we don't assume he's talking about children.
- reidman 11y ago
  Sure, but the title of this is "Girl figures out how to program giant computer". "The boy down in ballistics got in a shootout" is not something our hypothetical police chief would say. The title also implies some level of surprise that 'girl' 'figured out' this 'giant computer'. It might seem like a nitpick, but stuff like this adds up. I used to call women 'girls' occasionally, but I stopped when I realized that I'd rarely use 'boy' if the gender was flipped.
  - slavik81 11y ago
    > The title also implies some level of surprise that 'girl' 'figured out' this 'giant computer'. That's a good point. There was something about this title that I didn't like, but I wasn't really sure what it was. That may be it.

gravypod 11y ago

Since when is any of this news? Almost every early computing project had women on the staff.

icebraining 11y ago
HN is not just for news.

AlbertoGP 11y ago

I didn't know about her; the Wikipedia entry is at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Antonelli In another page she talks at length about her life: https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty... The rest of the comment is quotes from that page because it's quite long but I found it very interesting: The Differential Analyzer room was marked as a “Restricted” area and the door to it was kept locked. It was also the only air-conditioned room in the Moore School. It was air conditioned to maintain a constant temperature so the Analyzer hardware would not be affected by temperature changes because metal expands and contracts as the temperature goes up and down. I’m not sure how restricted the analyzer room was the first summer I was there, the summer of 1942, because it was ungodly hot that summer and the professors would come down and use the room for meetings. Pres Eckert and a group of engineers were working on the roof of the Moore School under a contract with MIT. It was for radar studies. It was hot, they were all in shorts except Pres, and they would come in the Analyzer room to cool off. [...] The ENIAC had a feature that helped test a program as well as the hardware. It could be set to run at full speed, 100,000 cycles/pulses per second. Or it could be set to run one-add time at a time. There were 20 pulses in an add-time so it stopped at every 20 pulses. Or it could be set to run one pulse at a time. This gave the operator the chance to look at the state of the machine at these various intervals to determine just when an error had occurred. These controls were mounted on a small unit that could be held in the hand. It was attached to a flexible cable so it was a remote control. As operators, our job was to track down where an error had occurred. Once we found out which tube was malfunctioning it was up to the maintenance man, either Homer Spence or Goldstein, an army corporal, to replace the failing unit. [...] The worst thing that happened to John was the security clearance problem. It started in 1949. That was when they were building the Binac. When the notice of his denial of clearance came in, Mr. Straus was still alive. He said that he knew Hoover personally and he would get it cleared up. The company was not doing any work that involved security devices, they were just building computers. Straus did get it cleared up. It was strange that each time his security was questioned, it came from the Philadelphia Ordnance Department. When I got John’s FBI file, it didn’t tell me where the information came from. But, it always came from Philadelphia. It was so persistent.. This file shows that John was a subscriber to Consumer Reports which was declared communist oriented. Also, it shows him as a member of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists. John declared that he never joined such an organization The only thing he could figure out was that he may have put his name on a list for literature at some time and they took that as joining. He was also accused of hiring security risks, such as Bob Shaw. Bob was a brilliant engineer and an albino with very limited eyesight. Bob owned a car. He could not see well enough to drive so he had various friends chauffeur him around. One time, one of his friends asked to borrow the car to drive to Washington, D. C. The friend drove it to Washington on a weekend when there was a parade that was considered pinko-oriented. Bob’s car was parked on the street while the chauffeur visited a friend. The police went along the street writing down license plate numbers. They traced the car to Bob. Bob wasn’t even there. Bob was also cited as getting various organization newsletters. [...] All the years I gave talks about the ENIAC, I always talked about it as John’s story, not my story. Although I mentioned that I had been an ENIAC Programmer, it was just in passing. [...] The only thing that I really regret is that Pres and I did not write our book about the ENIAC, EDVAC and Univac. Pres was always very angry about the lies that were told and copied from one book to the next, He said that they could go ahead and write their books, but he and I would write one telling the real story. [...] Somehow, we were wrapped up in our lives and never got around to writing the book. If I am remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as my family storyteller. It has been a great life.

basicplus2 11y ago

it comes across as pretty patronising to me... it sounds like all women don't really get any more mature than when they get to something like 13 years old... I can understand why women get steamed up over things like this.