Posted by The first computers were women.
They were actually called ‘computers’ as programming was traditionally female clerical work – lowly paid and unrecognised – even though it was complex and completely new, so laboratory owners would, when setting up new projects, say things like: We need three more microscopes and three girls. Girls, they were always called girls, not women, to portray them as not fully functioning adults were a cheap resource.
Their labour freed up the men to do the ‘real’ work. However it was the women who actually programmed and maintained the first computer ENIAC, in the 1940s. They were given some blueprints and told to figure out how ENIAC actually worked. However, when it did work, after these women had crawled through the vacuum tubes to literally remove all the bugs from the wires and the lights which stopped the computer from working – literally debugging and replacing burnt out transistors, they were all edited out of history.
Tracing the story from 1731 when the Edinburgh Weekly Journal advised young married women to know their husband’s income and be a good computer and keep within it until present day, we will see how computers couldn’t have evolved without the first ‘computers’.
Ruth’s Talk on the WI Learning Hub: Monday, 14 October 2024 at 6:00PM
