While the IT industry seems to be run mostly by men, women too made indelible contributions at a time when few even knew about IT
While the IT industry seems to be run mostly by men, women too made indelible contributions at a time when few even knew about IT
Ask people about famous women in IT and they will probably tell you about Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, or Carly Fiorina, who was earlier the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Some people may also tell you about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron.
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Kathleen Antonelli |
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Jean Bartik |
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Betty Holberton |
But there are a lot of women who have contributed to IT for a long time, dating back to the beginnings of computing itself. While a lot of them need to be lauded for their contributions, few deserve praise more than the six women who played a key role in programming ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).
And when we say programmed, we don't mean that they sat in an AC cabin like modern programmers, guzzling cola, eating pizza and using a keyboard Wikipedia says that the ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints and needed to be programmed with punch cards.
In fact, the word 'computer' itself is associated with women. According to Women in Technology International (WITI), a global organisation that helps tech-savvy women to attain their professional goals, 'The first programmers started out as Computers. This was the name given by the Army to a group of over 80 women working at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II calculating ballistics trajectories complex differential equations by hand.'
'Difficult' is a small word when it comes to describing how tough such a task could get.
She has a language named after her
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is said to be the world's first computer programmer and the language ADA is named after her. Ada (the language, not the woman) is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language. It was extended from the language Pascal and other programming languages.
How can one call Ada (the woman, not the programming language) the first programmer when she died in 1852, long before programming languages and computers existed? Ada was actually writing programs for a machine that Charles Babbage's analytical engine. Babbage, often called the father of the computer, was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and writing skills and called her 'The Enchantress of Numbers'.
But Lovelace's conception of a computer went far beyond numbers. She actually felt that it 'might act upon other things besides number...the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent' and when one looks back from today when we have computers that can do virtually anything we can appreciate that she was indeed an unparalleled genius.
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