The second Tuesday in October is Ada Lovelace Day, a day of recognition launched in 2009, when the British tech journalist Suw Charman-Anderson began a campaign to establish an “international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology”.
We’re participating today with this clip from a longer reel of historic, ca. 1945 footage of the ENIAC computer system. ENIAC was created at the University of Pennsylvania and was argued to be the first all electronic computer. While they received little recognition for their work at the time, the project team included a number of notable women, some of whom can be seen here in this footage. Recruited from a team of around two hundred women working in computing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were ENIAC’s first programmers, and worked under the direction of Herman and Adele Goldstine.