14/07/2025
In 1945, six women programmed the world’s first computer—without manuals, training, or recognition. A single photo almost erased them from tech history.
Kathy Kleiman, a young computer scientist, found the image years later. Curious about the women beside the massive ENIAC machine, she was told: “Probably just models.”
But they weren’t. They were the first true coders. Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence—pioneers hidden in plain sight.
Originally hired as “human computers” during WWII, they were tasked with programming ENIAC, a machine so massive and unfamiliar it had no manual—or precedent.
Banned from the lab, they wrote the first code from blueprints alone, inventing algorithms, flowcharts, and logic patterns on paper. Pure innovation.
When they finally got to touch the machine, they programmed it by hand—plugging in cables one by one to rewire its brain. And it worked.
On February 14, 1946, ENIAC stunned the world with its speed. But the newspapers never mentioned the women behind the magic.
The hardware engineers were celebrated. The programmers? Invisible—because society didn’t yet value what they did. Programming wasn’t even seen as real work.
As computing grew, so did the myth of the male coder. The women who built the foundation were pushed into silence and forgotten.
But they didn’t stop. Holberton wrote the first software application. Bartik built memory systems. McNulty helped invent subroutines—core concepts in modern coding.
Still, they vanished from textbooks. Until the 1980s, when Kleiman tracked them down, recorded their stories, and helped give them the spotlight they always deserved.
By 1997, they were honored publicly—most in their seventies. But the culture of tech had already shifted, claiming innovation as a boys’ domain.
We can’t change that erasure. But we can rewrite the narrative going forward—by remembering that women didn’t enter tech. They invented it.
Let’s teach every coder the full story: The first programmers weren’t just women. They were visionaries. And their legacy belongs to all of us.
~ The Inspireist
