ENIAC
02/14/1946 AD demonstrated
A press conference was held on February 1, 1946, and the completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, featuring demonstrations of its capabilities.
Elizabeth Snyder and Betty Jean Jennings were responsible for developing the demonstration trajectory program, although Herman and Adele Goldstine took credit for it.
The machine was formally dedicated the next day. None of the women involved in programming the machine or creating the demonstration were invited to the formal dedication nor to the celebratory dinner held afterwards.
In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Technology International Hall of Fame.
The role of the ENIAC programmers is treated in a 2010 documentary film titled Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII by LeAnn Erickson.
A 2014 documentary short, The Computers by Kate McMahon, tells of the story of the six programmers; this was the result of 20 years' research by Kathryn Kleiman and her team as part of the ENIAC Programmers Project.
In 2022 Grand Central Publishing released Proving Ground by Kathy Kleiman, a hardcover biography about the six ENIAC programmers and their efforts to translate block diagrams and electronic schematics of the ENIAC, then under construction, into programs that would be loaded into and run on ENIAC once it was available for use.
Lattitude: 39.9525° N
Longitude: 75.1652° W
Region: North America
Modern Day United States
Subjects Who or What demonstrated?
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University of Pennsylvania (UPenn, Penn) Private Ivy League resea...
Objects To Whom or What was demonstrated?
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ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) The first programmable, ...
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