Initially, computers were women.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California hired women as computers since 1936.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
They calculated the trajectory of a spacecraft based on the vehicle weight, lift capacity and the orbital dynamics of the planets.
Once the spacecraft is launched, they calculate its exact location, thanks to the signal its sends, along with other changing parameters (such as velocity, vehicle mass and the effect of gravity from nearby bodies)
They calculate also the launch windows, the fuel consumption and other details.
Source: When computer were human, by Ota Lutz, 2016, NASA.
ENIAC
Source: Computer history museum. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Archives
The military needed ENIAC for the calculation of ballistic tables. Those show the range of a particular gun, depending upon the type of shell that was fired, the charge of the propellant, the angle of elevation, and, in some cases, the meteorological conditions.
Source: Wikimedia commons
Adele Goldstine was the ENIAC’s first programmer and wrote the manual on its logical operation.
In 1946, she recruited and taught programming to the other women – the six “computers”: Kay McNulty, Frances Bilas, Betty Jean Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Ruth Lichterman, and Marlyn Wescoff.
They break down long equations into single operations that the computer could perform in sequence.
NASA’s Langley Research Center
Image Credit: NASA Langley Research Center
The first human computers were split into an East Wing, for white women, and a West Wing, for black women.
The history of Langley’s West Wing black women computers is described in a book called “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterl, which has been made into a movie.
The most famous of them is probably Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born in 1918) a mathematician and astrophysist.
Source: Wikimedia commons
Her work included calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those of astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezevous paths for the Apollo lunar lander and command module on flights to the Moon.
Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars.
The first American in orbit, John Glenn, insisted that the calculation of the computers were checked by her before the launch.
Source: Katherine Johnson Biography, by Margot Lee Shetterly
Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (1910 – 2008)
In 1949, Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to lead the group, making her the NACA’s first black supervisor, and one of the NACA’s few female supervisors. The Section Head title gave Dorothy rare Laboratory-wide visibility, and she collaborated with other well-known (white) computers like Vera Huckel and Sara Bullock on projects such as compiling a handbook for algebraic methods for calculating machines.
Source: Dorothy Vaughan Biography, by Margot Lee Shetterly
Mary Jackson (1921 – 2005)
Source: NASA
For nearly two decades she enjoyed a productive engineering career, authoring or co-authoring a dozen or so research reports, most focused on the behavior of the boundary layer of air around airplanes. In 1979, she fills the open position of Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager. There, she worked hard to impact the hiring and promotion of the next generation of all of NASA’s female mathematicians, engineers and scientists.
Source: Mary Jackson Biography, by Margot Lee Shetterly
Christine Darden
Christine Darden (born 1942, as Christine Mann) is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer. During her 40-year career at NASA, she led an advisory team composed of representatives from industrial manufacturers and academic institutions, became the deputy program manager of The TU-144 Experiments Program, an element of NASA’s High Speed Research Program; and, in 1999, she was appointed as the director in the Program Management Office of the Aerospace Performing Center where she was responsible for Langley research in air traffic management and other aeronautics programs managed at other NASA Centers. Darden also served as technical consultant on numerous government and private projects, and she is the author of more than 50 publications in the field of high lift wing design in supersonic flow, flap design, sonic boom prediction, and sonic boom minimization.
Source: Standing on the Shoulders of a Computer, by Denise Lineberry
Grace Murray Hopper (1906 – 1992)
In 1944, a military mathematician called Grace Murray Hopper graduated first in her class and started working on a computer called Mark 1.
In 1949, she joins the team developing the UNIVAC 1 (general purpose computer). And makes the first compiler, called A-0, operational in 1952. A compiler translates human readable instructions into machine language.
In 1954 Grace Hopper was named first director of automatic programming, and her department released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC. FLOW-MATIC is known as the first business oriented programming language, by using more “English like” expressions. FLOW-MATIC is extended later to make COBOL, still used today.
Source: Introducing a New Language for Automatic Programming Univac Flow-Matic, 1957 (PDF) ©Computer History Museum
Source: Introducing a New Language for Automatic Programming Univac Flow-Matic, 1957 (PDF) ©Computer History Museum
Kateryna Yushchenko (1919 – 2001)
Source: Wikimedia commons
In the Soviet Union, in 1955, independently of the development made in the US, Kateryna Yushchenko created the Address programming language, just over the binary (machin) language, for the first programmable computer of the Soviet Union. The Address language was widely used in the Soviet Union for more than 20 years.
Kathleen Booth
Source: Centre for Computing History of Cambridge
One of the first assembly language was written by Kathleen Booth in 1955, for her husband’s computer called ARC. Assembly language is an archaic form of programming language, directly above the binary machine language.
Lois Haibt
Lois Haibt contributed to the conception of a well-known mathematical programming language called FORTRAN (1954).
Adele Goldberg (1945 – …)
Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay, and others developed Smalltalk-80, which introduced a programming environment of overlapping windows on graphic display screens. It became the basis for graphical user interfaces, replacing the earlier command line systems.
Margaret Hamilton (1936 – …)
Source: Wikimedia commons
The lunar lander of mission Apollon 11 could have crashed on the moon if the program she designed hadn’t been able to manage the overload of data due to a failure in the radar.
Karen Spärck Jones FBA (1935 – 2007)
Source: University of Cambridge
Karen Spärck Jones’ formula is called Tf-idf, which stands for “term frequency-inverse document frequency”
It determins the frequency of a word in a document, weighted down by the general frequency of the word in all available documents (excluding non relevant but frequent word such as “is, “of”, “that”…).
The word’s importance in the document determines its indexing, so its availability in search engine results.
Her formula underlies most modern search engines today.
Barbara Liskov (1939 – …)
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Courtesy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara Liskov developed the CLU language in mid-1970s, which influenced many well-known languages, such as Java, Python, and C++, adopting one or more of its pioneering concepts.
Together with Jeannette Wing, she developed the Liskov substitution principle, which is one of the basic concept of object oriented programming, a methodology used in most computer languages today.
Liskov won the Turing Prize in 2008 (the Nobel prize equivalent for computing).
Radia Perlman (1951 – …)
Source: Wikimedia commons
Radia Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol in 1985, to ensure that there is no loops, when there are redundant paths in the network. This protocol is necessary to make internet work, otherwise, transmissions would be trapped in endless loops.
She has also done extensive and innovative research, particularly on encryption and networking.
Shafi Goldwasser (1958 – …)
Source: Wikimedia commons
Shafi Goldwasser made important research on complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory.
She is co-inventor of probabilistic encryption, which set up and achieved the gold standard for security for data encryption. She is also co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, which probabilistically and interactively demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any additional knowledge, and are a key tool in the design of cryptographic protocols.
She received 2 times the Gödel Prize for her research on complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory, and the invention of zero-knowledge proofs. She won the Turing Prize in 2012.
Anita Borg
Source: Wikimedia commons
Anita Borg built a Unix-based operating system after her PhD, and developed and patented a method to optimize memory systems (1989). She has founded the organization Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (1997) and cofounded Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (1994)
Mary Lou Jepsen
Source: “For a Brain-Computer Interface that Actually Works, Are Holograms Our Only Hope?” by Kristen V. Brown
Mary Lou Jepsen designed and constructed the first holographic video system at the MIT Media Lab in 1989. Since then she led many projects around display screen innovation
More about Mary Lou Jepsen: http://www.maryloujepsen.com/
Frances Elizabeth Allen
Source: Virginia Tech
Frances Elizabeth Allen’s pioneering compiler work culminated in algorithms and technologies that are the basis for the theory of program optimization today and are widely used throughout the industry. She also programmed languages and security codes for the National Security Agency.
Frances Elizabeth Allen was the first female IBM Fellow and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award.
Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)
Ada Lovelace is known as the first person to publish an algorithm intended to be executed by the Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage.
Her work is available here (her notes are approximately at the third of the page):
Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, by L. F. Menabrea of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, with notes upon the Memoir by the Translator Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace.
More inspiring women in computing on Wikipedia: Women in computing