CAPTURED IN FRANCE, TORTURED, AND SENT TO
RAVENSBRUCK, SHE WAS SENTENCED TO DEATH—TWICE—
AND NEVER SPOKE A NAME. MOST DID NOT SURVIVE
WHAT SHE ENDURED. BUT SHE DID SURVIVE.
LIBERATED IN ‘I945. SHE WALKED OUT ALIVE WHEN
SURVIVAL ITSELF WAS RESISTANCE.
Jean Bartik entered computing
at a moment when no one even knew what the job was
called. In the 1940s, she and five other women were
assigned to the
calculate artillery trajectories. It filled a room, roared
with heat, and had no programming language, no
manuals, no diagrams, and no precedent. What existed
was hardware—cables, switches, and panels—and the
expectation that these women would somehow make
it work.
Programming ENIAC meant thinking in pure logic.
Bartik learned to translate complex mathematical
equations into physical actions, crawling inside the
machine, rewiring it by hand, setting thousands of
switches, and debugging problems by sound and
instinct. When something went wrong, there was no
code to review—only miles of wiring to trace. They
weren't just using the machine; they were inventing
the very idea of how a computer could be instructed
Their most revolutionary achievement came when
they transformed ENIAC from a single-purpose
weapon calculator into the first stored-program
computer. This leap—allowing a machine to hold
instructions rather than be rewired for every task—
became the foundation of modern software. Yet when
ENIAC was unveiled to the public, the women who
made it function were largely ignored, mistaken for
models or assistants rather than architects of a new
field.
Bartik spent decades watching computing become
one of the most powerful industries in the world while
the women who built its foundations were erased from
its origin story. Only later in life did she begin receiving
recognition for what she had always known: that
modern computing did not begin with sleek code or
corporate labs, but with women who taught a machine
how to think before society was ready to credit them
for it.
https://share.google/UKH8n2kFpnB2547jB
No comments:
Post a Comment