The Six Who Made It Run

Your child listens; you read. This page is here so you can answer the questions that come after the story. The script is available from the transcript button during playback.

What this is about

The six first operators who actually made ENIAC — the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built 1943–1946 — run were all women. So was the team that wired its thousands of connections, and that team was forgotten.

Three threads.

1. Who made it run — six women operators, and a forgotten, almost entirely female wiring team.
2. ⭐A long-held belief was wrong. "Programming was an afterthought" turns out not to be true.
3. Why the misunderstanding happened — people built pasts that were useful to them.

What actually happened

• ⭐Its two primary inventors were John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. ENIAC's origins begin with them, through the original 1942 and 1943 proposals, the approval process, and the initial assembly of a team. The problem it was commissioned for was the computation of artillery trajectories (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0002).
• ENIAC did not come from nowhere either. The same chapter documents connections to earlier work on differential analyzers — a machine constructed during the 1930s, and a 1940 proposal by Irven Travis for a digital electronic version (same DOI).
• ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. It was created and tested at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946, then used at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland until 1955 (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.001.0001).
• Its first team of operators were all women, and they contributed to the machine's achievements and to the development of computer programming practice (same DOI). The initial cohort numbered six (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0004).
• ⭐The builders were women too, and were forgotten. ENIAC was built by "a forgotten, almost exclusively female, team of 'wiremen.'" Wartime procurement of wire, steel, custom power supplies and high-precision resistors was hard; the project was repeatedly delayed, requiring contract renegotiations; and the team faced challenges including a flood while debugging ENIAC for a Los Alamos calculation (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0004).
• ⭐"Programming was not an afterthought." ENIAC's architecture and control method were shaped, to a degree not previously recognised, by an early and very detailed exploration led by Arthur W. Burks of how the machine could be "set up" to calculate shell trajectories. In the paper's words: "Programming ENIAC was not, as has often been asserted, an 'afterthought' to its design and construction." (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0003)
• Nor was conditional branching added late. The ability to change the course of a computation based on results so far — later conceptualised as a conditional branch — is widely believed to have been added late; the same study shows otherwise (same DOI).
• Why the story drifted. A study of ENIAC's cultural career from 1945 onward — newspaper reports, early computing texts, the long patent cases of the 1960s–70s, its place as a museum relic, the mid-1990s anniversaries, and the recent focus on its initial cohort of female operators — documents the various and sometimes contradictory uses to which different computing communities have put ENIAC in constructing "useful pasts" (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0013).

Questions your child may ask

"What were their names?" ⚠️ We could not obtain all six names. Searched from three angles, our abstracts specify only "six female operators" — the names are in the book's body text, not the abstract. So the story says that fact out loud: "I cannot give you all six of their names today… and that is exactly what this story is about. This is what 'forgotten' means."

Two names are sourced, though. In the spring 1947 conversion project, Adele Goldstine worked with a team of contractors led by Jean Bartik and Aberdeen employees under Richard Clippinger to develop the "set-ups" implementing a new control mechanism and vocabulary of general-purpose instructions (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0008). If you want to give your child one name, give them Jean Bartik.

"What is programming?" Telling a machine which job to do in which order. Back then it meant plugging cables and turning switches, not typing.

"Why were they forgotten?" The research offers a structure rather than a reason — each community made a past useful to itself (DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0013). For a child: "people remember in the direction they want to remember."

"So who built it?" Mauchly and Eckert invented it. This piece does not erase that — the story says plainly, "Their names stayed, and they should have." On top of that it adds: inventing does not make a machine turn, and the wiring and the running were women's work whose names did not stay.

⚠️ If your child presses — "but who really made it?" — the answer is both. This piece is not trying to move the credit; it is looking at how far credit gets recorded.

What is evidence and what is story

What the sources state — ENIAC's standing as the first general-purpose electronic digital computer; 1943–1946 and use until 1955; that the first operators were all women and numbered six; that the wiring team was almost exclusively female and forgotten; wartime procurement, delays and a flood; the correction on programming; the correction on conditional branching; and the "useful pasts" analysis.

What this piece deliberately avoided

• All six operators' names (see above — the story says aloud that we could not find them).
• The story that Philadelphia's lights dimmed when ENIAC ran. Widely repeated, but the only text we obtained is a preprint, so it is not used.
• Figures for the machine's size, weight or power draw. The story says only that it filled a room.
• What the Los Alamos calculation was for (assessing a fusion weapon design) — not a level to carry to an eight-year-old; it appears here only.

Sources

• ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.001.0001
• Bringing ENIAC to Life. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0004
• Structuring ENIAC. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0003
• Remembering ENIAC. DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0013
• Converting ENIAC (Jean Bartik, Adele Goldstine; disputed credit). DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0008
• Imagining ENIAC (Mauchly and Eckert; the 1942/1943 proposals; the differential-analyzer lineage). DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.003.0002

Landmark — none. The subject is a machine, not a paper.

Things to try together

• Give an order without speaking. Ask for a cup of water using only steps written on paper. A step will always be missing — and that is programming.
• Listen with the Turing and Shannon pieces. Turing defines calculation, Shannon joins switches to logic, and at ENIAC people actually make the machine run.