Do you love solving problems with mathematics? So did groundbreaking computer programmer Jean Bartik. She turned her passion for math into a successful career in what was then a brand-new field. During World War II, women took on more technology jobs as men joined the armed forces. Bartik started her career doing mathematical calculations for top-secret weapons systems projects. After the war, a new machine took over these calculations. It was the first all-electronic computer, and Bartik helped build and program it. But how did Bartik's interest in mathematics take her to the forefront of cutting-edge technology? Find out how she went from gifted student to software pioneer.

"Jean Bartik was one of the first programmers of the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). Learn how her love of math led her to work for the Army and then help develop the ENIAC."--

In early 1945, the United States military was recruiting female mathematicians for a top-secret project to help win World War II. Betty Jean Jennings (Bartik), a twenty-year-old college graduate from rural northwest Missouri, wanted an adventure, so she applied for the job. She was hired as a "computer" to calculate artillery shell trajectories for Aberdeen Proving Ground, and later joined a team of women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the first successful general-purpose programmable electronic computer. In 1947, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first stored-program electronic computer. Even with her talents, Bartik met obstacles in her career due to attitudes about women's roles in the workplace. Her perseverance paid off and she worked with the earliest computer pioneers and helped launch the commercial computer industry. Despite their contributions, Bartik and the other female ENIAC programmers have been largely ignored. In the only autobiography by any of the six original ENIAC programmers, Bartik tells her story, exposing myths about the computer's origin and properly crediting those behind the computing innovations that shape our daily lives.

As a young girl in the 1930s, Jean Bartik dreamed of adventures in the world beyond her family's farm in northwestern Missouri. After college, she had her chance when she was hired by the US Army to work on a secret project. At a time when many people thought women could not work in technical fields like science and mathematics, Jean became one of the world's first computer programmers. She helped program the ENIAC, the first successful stored-program computer, and had a long career in the field of computer science. Thanks to computer pioneers like Jean, today we have computers that can do almost anything.

The contentious history of the computer programmers who developed the software that made the computer revolution possible. This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the people who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, it tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legions of computer specialists—programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers—who transformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of the modern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, these specialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact of electronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general. In The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan Ensmenger traces the rise to power of the computer expert in modern American society. His rich and nuanced portrayal of the men and women (a surprising number of the “computer boys” were, in fact, female) who built their careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power, identity, and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerized society. In his recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyes of its principle revolutionaries, Ensmenger reminds us that the computerization of modern society was not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but was rather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.

Have you ever watched video of astronauts walking on the moon? Margaret Hamilton programmed software that helped get them there. As a girl, Hamilton loved math and science. She grew up during a time when very few women studied computer science, but Hamilton knew she wanted to write code. As an adult, she worked on NASA's Apollo program, creating computer programs to guide spacecraft to and from the moon. This included the 1969 Apollo 11 mission—the first spaceflight that landed humans on the moon. In 2016, Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work. Learn how Hamilton's passion for math and computers played a key role in space exploration.

Based on original interviews with surviving participants and the first study of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert's personal papers, ENIAC tells the story of the three-year race to complete the world's first computer--and of the three-decade struggle to take credit for it. 10 illustrations.