I had reason to search for hulking computers, and these two interesting articles came up:
Around the end of the second world war at the University of Pensylvania, a group of six women were being introduced to the ENIAC — a machine designed to calculate ballistics trajectories. Plucked from pools of manual computers, they were tasked to operate the hulking giant. The women jumped at the chance, since the only other career options open to a woman with a technical mind were teaching or doing calculations for insurance companies.
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These women were at the forefront of computer science, and arguably invented the practice of modern software engineering.Kay McNulty invented the subroutine in order to increase the computing capability of the ENIAC. Betty Holberton invented the first generator program (a program that creates another program), the SORT-MERGE generator. Betty also invented breakpoints, specifying a point at which the computer should pause so that the programmer can inspect the state of the program to find a bug.
In December 1945, a secret sat behind a heavy door at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eighty feet long, made of hulking black metal, and weighing 30 tons, "it was just a monstrous thing,” recalled Betty Snyder Holberton a half century later. She and five other young mathematicians, Kathleen McNulty (later Mauchly Antonelli), Jean Jennings (Bartik), Marlyn Wescoff (Meltzer), Frances Bilas (Spence), and Ruth Lichterman (Teitelbaum), were the secret’s keepers, tasked with figuring out how it ticked and putting it to use.
Perhaps see also previously
