[DaleBiagio]

ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.

They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself.

It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.

[AnimalMuppet]

Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.

[DaleBiagio]

That's a fascinating detail! Do you know which machine?

The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.

[AnimalMuppet]

I do not know. I think it was before she first got an assembler. Memory was still tubes, not core.

I kind of think she was at White Sands at the time, so... maybe look at what White Sands was using for missile trajectory calculations around 1954 or 1955?

[adrian_b]

Perhaps one of the IBM 60x programmable calculator series, which were widely used.

[adrian_b]

There were programmers before that, e.g. for the IBM ASCC at Harvard, which was based on the ideas of Howard Aiken (inspired by Babbage).

Programming the IBM ASCC (a.k.a. Harvard Mark I) was much closer to the programming a modern computer in comparison with ENIAC, as it had an instruction set and programmers wrote a sequence of instructions on punched tapes. However even ASCC had some panels where it was possible to rewire some of the execution units to change their behavior, i.e. to change what some of the instructions from the instruction set did, but that was not the primary means for programming the computer. In ASCC the rewiring was akin to the microprogramming available in some later electronic computers, where you could change what some instructions did or you could add custom instructions.

Among the programmers of the IBM ASCC, Grace Hopper became later famous due to her contributions to the first high-level programming languages.

Therefore the profession of programmer has not started with ENIAC, even if the ENIAC programmers were among the first programmers.

[LetsGetTechnicl]

Thank you for highlighting the contributions of women in computing, especially at it's inception! That is so easily forgotten or intentionally ignored in the age of the "tech bro"

[DaleBiagio]

The ENIAC women's story is especially striking because they were classified as "sub-professional".

The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical.

That framing took decades to reverse.

[adrian_b]

There were other programmers before those of ENIAC, but they also included women, like Grace Hopper, who later had an important role in the development of programming languages.

[DaleBiagio]

Hopper's trajectory from the Mark I to FLOW-MATIC to COBOL is one of the great arcs in computing.

She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd because "computers don't understand English."