Jean Jennings Bartik
![Picture](/uploads/5/0/1/8/50182615/767852832.jpg?170)
Early Life and Education
Betty Jean Jennings was born in Gentry County, Missouri, in 1924. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College and majored in mathematics ; she graduated as the only math major from her college. In 1945, she applied for an Army project in Philadelphia and was hired by the University of Pennsylvania for Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground to calculate ballistics trajectories by hand as a human "computer."
ENIAC Career
When the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed for the purpose of calculating these same trajectories, Bartik applied to become a part of the project and was eventually selected to be one of its first programmers. Bartik and five other female programmers became extremely adept at running the ENIAC, after learning how the machine worked only by reviewing diagrams of the device and by talking to its engineers; there being no manual.
Bartik later became part of a group charged with converting the ENIAC into a stored program computer. After the war (World War II ), she went on to work with the ENIAC designers John Eckert and John Mauchly, and helped them develop the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers.
Achievements
In 1997, Bartik was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. Years later, in 2008, she was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for contributions as one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system" in 1945, and for " further assistance in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers." That same year, she also received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society, for "pioneering work as one of the first programmers, including co-leading the first teams of ENIAC programmers, and pioneering work on BINAC and UNIVAC I." She died in 2011 at age 86 .
Information adapted from:
http://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-betty-jean-bartik [cited 12 April 2015]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik [cited 12 April 2015]
Betty Jean Jennings was born in Gentry County, Missouri, in 1924. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College and majored in mathematics ; she graduated as the only math major from her college. In 1945, she applied for an Army project in Philadelphia and was hired by the University of Pennsylvania for Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground to calculate ballistics trajectories by hand as a human "computer."
ENIAC Career
When the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed for the purpose of calculating these same trajectories, Bartik applied to become a part of the project and was eventually selected to be one of its first programmers. Bartik and five other female programmers became extremely adept at running the ENIAC, after learning how the machine worked only by reviewing diagrams of the device and by talking to its engineers; there being no manual.
Bartik later became part of a group charged with converting the ENIAC into a stored program computer. After the war (World War II ), she went on to work with the ENIAC designers John Eckert and John Mauchly, and helped them develop the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers.
Achievements
In 1997, Bartik was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. Years later, in 2008, she was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for contributions as one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system" in 1945, and for " further assistance in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers." That same year, she also received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society, for "pioneering work as one of the first programmers, including co-leading the first teams of ENIAC programmers, and pioneering work on BINAC and UNIVAC I." She died in 2011 at age 86 .
Information adapted from:
http://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-betty-jean-bartik [cited 12 April 2015]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bartik [cited 12 April 2015]