Ruth Lichterman was an American mathematician and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, the machine unveiled to the public in 1946 as the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. She and her fellow programmers developed the earliest practical techniques for operating a machine of ENIACs kind, work that went largely uncredited publicly for decades even as photographs of the machine itself, without its programmers named, became widely reproduced.
Facts
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Why are the ENIAC programmers such as Ruth Lichterman so little known?
Their work was seen as clerical and left out of early accounts of the ENIAC.
Ruth Lichterman, later Ruth Teitelbaum, was one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC. The IEEE Computer Society says that in the course of their work these six women developed subroutines, nesting and other fundamental programming techniques, yet their work at the time was largely viewed as clerical and so was left out of contemporary accounts of the machine. It adds that only in recent decades has their story begun to receive its due recognition.
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Sources
1. Wikipedia: Ruth Lichterman
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
Ruth Teitelbaum (née Lichterman; February 1, 1924 - August 9, 1986) was an American computer programmer and mathematician who was one of the first computer programmers in the world.
2. Wikidata: Ruth Lichterman
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