Marlyn Wescoff was one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, the general-purpose electronic digital computer completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania. Like her five fellow programmers, she came from the wartime corps of women who had manually computed ballistics tables, and she helped work out from scratch how to translate a mathematical problem into the physical wiring and switch settings the machine required, with no programming manual or precedent to draw on.
Facts
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Why is Marlyn Wescoff missing from early coverage of ENIAC?
Press coverage of ENIAC's 1946 unveiling showed only men, although Wescoff and Lichterman ran the public demonstration.
When ENIAC was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania in February 1946, the articles and pictures published at the time featured only men, even though women had created the test run that impressed the media. Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum were the two women who carried out that public demonstration. Penn Engineering says the work of the six women who developed and programmed the machine was effectively erased from the record, and that they gained recognition only decades later, when historians, filmmakers and women in computer science looked to them as role models. They were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Marlyn Wescoff
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer (1922 - December 7, 2008) was an American mathematician and computer programmer, and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
2. Wikidata: Marlyn Wescoff
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