Wednesday, 3 May 2017

History of Women in Computing

From programming languages to robotics to interaction designs, women have been pioneers in the evolution of computing. But what’s surprising is that only a few women enter computing as a career today.
Before the 1980s, many women undertook computer science degrees, but with the advent of the home computer (early 1980s), this number steadily dropped. By the mid-1990s, only 28% of women were studying computer science at the post-secondary level.
Jean Bartik (December 1924 – March 2011) was among the first computer programmers who developed a technology known as software. She majored in mathematics at the Northwest Missouri State Teachers College. After completing her studies, she was employed by the University of Pennsylvania to work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army facility based in the United States. She was tasked with manually calculate ballistics trajectories for the Army Ordnance at the facility.

While at the facility, she was selected to be among the first group of women programmers for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Other members of the ENIAC group were Frances Spence, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Teitelbaum and Betty Holberton. The ENIAC was invented to calculate the firing trajectories for artillery shells. It was completed in 1946, too late to be used in World War II, but it was a breakthrough in the development of modern computing. The Eniac is even credited as the first all-electronic digital computer.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815 –1852), was a gifted mathematician and a computing pioneer. She is mainly remembered for her work on the proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, which was developed by Charles Babbage. She translated Babbage’s analytical engine which had been written for a Swiss journal by the Italian engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea.

She did not only translate the text but added her own description of the machine. More than a century after Ada Lovelace’s death, in 1953, her description of Babbage’s Analytical Engine was republished. On December 10, 1980, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) approved the reference manual for its latest computer programming language, “Ada.”

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