via CNN.com
Jean Jennings Bartik, the last of six women programmers who debugged and operated the earliest general-purpose computer, has died.
Bartik, 86, died Wednesday in New York, said Jon Rickman, vice president of information systems at Bartik’s alma mater, Northwest Missouri State University, and director of the Jean Jennings Bartik Computer Museum.
Bartik was profiled in a CNN.com story last month about women mathematicians who were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research during World War II. Bartik and five of her fellow “computers” went on to program the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, but they didn’t receive recognition for their work until years later.
“Jean is probably one of the most significant pioneers in computing,” Rickman said. “Jean worked hard and, as a woman in a man’s world at that time, especially in the business world, it’s amazing what she was able to accomplish.”
Bartik graduated from Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in 1945 as the school’s one math major. She recalled living on her parents’ farm, refusing the teaching jobs her father suggested and avoiding all talk of marrying a farmer and having babies. Instead, she took a train to Philadelphia to work for the military.
There, she learned ballistics calculations and was quickly hired to work on the ENIAC, created during the war by University of Pennsylvania scientists John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr.
Bartik and her colleagues debugged the computer, which weighed 30 tons, contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes and completed the same work the women “computers” did but in a fraction of the time.
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