Top Secret Rosies: The Unknown Women Programmers of ENIAC in World War II

Women have played an important role in countless events that have transformed history to create the world we live in today. The field of computing is one of many areas where women have made invaluable contributions, laying the groundwork for advances that allow us to live in a highly technological and connected world today. Since March is Women’s History Month and I’m also a woman in this amazing and fulfilling field of technology, I would like to pay tribute to these pioneers by telling their stories.

In the 1940s, there was a significant boom in mathematical and computational sciences, mainly because the Second World War created a significant demand for technological development to carry out tasks such as espionage and ballistic calculations. It is for this reason that in 1946, engineers John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly launched the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), one of the first fully digital computers capable of being reprogrammed to solve various numerical problems.

The creation of ENIAC was funded by the United States Army and was initially created to calculate artillery firing tables for the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory. Eckert was in charge of the hardware design and Mauchly the conceptual design.