I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which

I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which is worth reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-Changed/dp/1612480861 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Compute... It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".