Programming the ENIAC was quite a challenge. It was several more years before someone came up with the idea to store program instructions in memory. The ENIAC was programmed by plugging in hundreds of cables to determine the flow of the program. The program was changed by reconfiguring the way the cables were plugged in. When I first got into programming, there were still many early or pre-computers in use that operated based on that concept. By that time it had advanced so that the boards containing all these cables were interchangeable. You didn't have one set of cables that had to be redone each time you changed the program -- you wired up different configurations on "plug boards" and inserted the plug board you needed depending on which program you were going to run. I worked in any number of computer rooms that still had racks of plug boards wired in different configurations sitting along the wall.

But I digress. The interesting fact about the ENIAC is that the people who were hired to do all this tedious rewiring each time the program needed to be changed were all women. Yes, women were the first computer programmers. This was a period in time when complex mathematical calculations were performed by teams of people, with the calculation broken into many parts so that many people could do it. This was needed for many astronomical or aeronautical or ballistics calculations that would have taken weeks or months for one person to work all the way through. Many of the people hired to work in the teams of people doing these calculations (they were called "computers") were women. Women were thought to be uniquely qualified because of their ability to handle details. Since there was virtually no upward career path in this work, I suspect that it was also assumed to be appropriate for people who were considered to just be working "for now" until they could get married and have kids. It was the only kind of work, other than teaching or bookkeeping, that women with degrees in science or math could usually get.

The ENIAC was designed to replace this kind of labor-intensive calculation process so it was just natural for the people running the lab where the ENIAC was built to think of people who were already doing this kind of calculation work as the natural people to train to do the tedious process of figuring out how the cables needed to be configured for each application and then do the work. So they hired a bunch of women. Somewhere along the line, though, computer programming turned into men's work, not women's work, and as far as I know no one has really done a study of that. My own view is that it occurred when universities began offering classes and then degrees in computer science. That was a practical career with advancement opportunities and women generally were steered away from those kinds of classes. My friend, Ann Hardy, for example, is a few years older than I am so went to college in the mid-50s. She majored in Phys. Ed. just so she could get a woman counselor who would support her wish to take science and math classes. Ann ended up being one of the programming team on IBM's STRETCH computer, one of the most influential and innovative computers designed in the early 60s.

Boy, do those bring back memories. Mostly memories of how fantastic and wonderful I thought all of this was. Just the ability to see all your files on the screen without having to run a program to print out the information you needed was so great. Also what it reminds me is that despite the glories of seeing the information displayed that way, is that I invariably ended up using the MS-DOS commands to get at the files and do what I wanted to with them. I continued to do that through all the upgrades to Windows through Windows 95. It wasn't really until Windows ME (the one I had before Windows XP) that I stopped going behind Windows into MS-DOS on a regular basis.