Phone recording: "I'm recording this on my phone. As I record, I'm going to switch over to whatsapp, and I'm going to send my sister a GIF of a monkey.
I'm going to type in 'monkey'
And... send".
Okay, here's the fun part.
As I scrolled, GIFs were being downloaded, stored and decoded into the memory of my phone. Maybe 20, 30 of them. On some lazy mornings, when I'm looking for that perfect animal, I scroll through hundreds of GIFs.
Barely 52 years ago, when this song [Hey Jude] was number one, the world's most powerful supercomputer was the Cray 6600. It had just under a megabyte of RAM.
The Cray would not be able to hold 6 of those Monkey GIFs in memory at the same time, and, adjusted for inflation, it cost 18 million dollars.
The exponential growth of computing power is one of the great cliches of modern life. But cliches hide so many stories.
Contrary to what many people claim, computers are the most human technology we have created. Your most personal computer, your phone is, possibly, the thing that reveals the most about you.
And on the other end of the existential microscope, if you're the kind of person that likes to look at the stars and contemplate the Universe and our place in it, you're looking at a 43 year old computer piloting the Voyager 1 space probe, writing and re-writing magnetic tape in a sealed room 21 billion km from Earth.
Technology is just humanity amplified. The good, and the flawed.
Welcome to The Unsung, a podcast about the lesser-known people and events that have quietly shaped our world.
[intro]
Chimamanda Adichie: "Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, Over and over again, and that is what they become."
Today's story is about the people behind the first computer. And also, oddly enough, about stereotypes.
As we interact with the world around us, our brain would get exhausted if it processed every single piece of data. So it takes shortcuts. We stereotype. It helps us deal with the huge number of new people and situations we encounter daily.
[stereotypes play]
An interesting side-effect of this is that we stereotype ourselves.
Imagine a Chinese American woman. Call her Jill. Let's tell Jill we're going to give her a difficult maths test, and that we're going to judge her performance on the test.
At this point, we split the universe into two.
Same Jill, same test, but one important difference.
In one universe we tell her that the study is to compare the mathematical aptitude of men and women.
In the other, we tell her it is to compare people who grew up in Asian homes vs other cultures.
How do you think Jill will perform?
Odds are Jill will perform worse when she believes she's being tested as a woman.
This is a well-studied phenomenon in social psychology called the Stereotype Threat. Where people perform worse when a negative stereotype of theirs is activated. There are two stereotypes at play with Jill.
One: "We have the perception that girls aren't supposed to like math."
Two: "People think Asians are geniuses and good at math"
Depending on which identity of Jill's is activated, she will perform either better or worse.
It isn't a subtle effect either. A 1995 study compared African American students with their Caucasian counterparts. When there was no mention of their performance being assessed, black students did great; they solved an average of 9 questions, compared to 8 for white students. When their negative stereotype ("likelier to drop out") was activated though, they answered only 4.
Richard Dawkins once defended a controversial tweet of his with the refrain that 'facts cannot be racist'. But in some contexts, reminding a boy that he's black, or Jill that she's a woman isn't a simple statement of fact. It's a deliberate message.
BARTIK
On a farm in Missouri, in 1924, Jean Bartik was born Betty Jean Jennings into a family of teachers.
I could talk about how she attended a single-room school, and how she was good at math. How, after graduating from school, she took a $25 loan from her Aunt Gretchen, and enrolled in college in Northwest Missouri State Teachers College. I could go on about how she was one of two math students at college, and they had to pull teachers out of retirement to teach two new courses just for her. And how she was the only math major from her college in 1945.
I could tell you many more things about Jean, and a lot of it is endearing. But that's not the point of this story, so let me summarize by making a judgement - she's smart.
Jean's father was a teacher, her grandmother, uncles and aunts were all teachers. So her family expected her to be a teacher. Many of her teachers told her to become a teacher. Because of the world war going on then, there was a shortage of teachers. The stars were perfectly aligned for Jean to become a teacher.
But Jean wanted adventure. So she applied to two jobs that weren't teaching jobs. One of those was the job of a computer.
You see, before the computers we know today existed, we had human computers - people that compute. They would do all the complex calculations required for businesses and scientists. Without electronics, if you had to calculate a complex expression, what would you do? You have log books and tables, but who did the calculations for the log books in the first place?
Big institutions had flesh and blood computers. People that were hired to do calculations in wholesale, all day. They would use mechanical calculators and differential analyzers to help them, but these were a far cry from the magical electronic devices we use today. They could only do the simple task that they were specifically meant for. If you had a complex formula, you still had to break it down and feed it in piece by piece.
It was a menial job for a mathematician. And so, few men were interested, and it ended up that women, women like Jean, took these jobs because they were far more appealing than the alternative. In March 1945, after a long wait, Jean got a job offer.
Jean: "Finally when they sent me the offer, they sent it by telegram, and they said I was hired and to come immediately. Well, I was on the [unintelligible] train out of Stanberry the next night.
And guess what, I was hired as an SP, a sub-professional. They did not give professional titles to women at Aberdeen even if you had a PhD."
Jean was hired as a computer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her job was to calculate ballistics trajectories for the war. To figure out where something that was shot out of their big guns would land.
Now, the University of Pennsylvania is famous for a lot of things, but it just so happened that at the time, a secret project was brewing in the depths of their Electrical Engineering department:
[music]
ENIAC. Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Brainchild of Engineer Presper Eckert and Physicist John Mauchley, and commissioned in top secret by the US Army.
Every computer student has read about it in chapter one of their introduction to computers. It was the forefather - The first digital computer. Remember when I was talking about how before electronics, they had to hire people to do calculations? Well ENIAC was the half-million dollar project that aimed to change all that. They wanted to build a machine that could calculate. That could be adapted on the fly to any complex formulae the Generals threw at it. Where a ballistics calculation took over 20 hours for a human, ENIAC was designed to tear through it in just 30 seconds.
This ability to be adapted for different formulae was key. Unlike the mechanical calculators that existed, ENIAC could be programmed with any arbitrary formula. Of course, programming at that point involved physically rewiring the machine, and turning on and off a complex array of switches. It involved knowing the machine inside out, understanding the logic of how it worked and having a highly mathematical mind.
Well, guess who happened to have a highly mathematical mind.
[recording of US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith]
Eckert and Mauchley invented a computer called the ENIAC, and so they went upstairs and found six of the computers, the women, and asked them, come downstairs, and start to work on the secret government project. [...]
So they handed the six women the wiring diagrams and said, "You guys figure out how to do this".
[end recording]
And this is how six mathematically gifted women became the first programmers of the first digital computer.
Their names were Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Kay Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.
They were given only a wiring diagram. And left to figure out how to get this 27-tonne monstrosity of vacuum tubes, switches and cables working the way it should.
By her own words, it was the best time of Jean's life.
She had left Missouri because she had wanted adventure, and now she was at the cutting-edge of mathematics, working with top-secret military technology, and making it do things at speeds that the world then had never imagined. It was a job that demanded so much, and all six women discovered that they had been waiting for just that. Kay Antonelli compared the feeling to that of being a fighter pilot.
On Valentine's day, in February, six months after they started, they had ENIAC ready to be shown to the world, in a press conference.
Arthur Burks, one of the designers of ENIAC gave the presentation.
"One of the first things I did was to add 5,000 numbers together. Seems a bit silly, but I told the press, 'I am now going to add 5,000 numbers together' and pushed the button. The ENIAC added 5,000 numbers together in one second. The problem was finished before the reporters had looked up!
The main part of the demonstration was the trajectory. For this we chose a trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to go from the gun to its target. Remember that [human computers] could compute this in three days, and the differential analyzer could do it in 30 minutes. The ENIAC calculated this 30-second trajectory in just 20 seconds, faster than the shell itself could fly."
This was the beginning of the information age. That press conference may have single-handedly dictated how people viewed computers for decades to come, as larger-than-life heralds of the future. The science fiction of the 50s and 60s, they capture that awe.
The next day, there was a celebratory dinner at UPenn. The six programmers were not even invited.
Neither had they been introduced at the public press conference. There were photos of them with the computer, but people years later, even historians, were under the impression that they were 'refrigerator models', like the car models of today, posing to make the machine look good.
Jean is very clear about how UPenn was full of great people. From Eckert and Mauchley to the other engineers that she worked with. In her own words, "They were so honest. They were good men. And Pres worked constantly, and neither one of them were concerned with the women issue."
Clearly, they were not left out because of spite or bitterness, but does it matter? I think the fact that they were not championed by their own - It makes it sting a bit more.
If I were in their place, I'd probably have a moment of self-doubt. Stereotype threat.
What did Jean, Betty, Kay, Marlyn, Fran and Ruth do though? They dove back into work with undiminished focus. By 1947, collaborating with other pioneers in their field, they had converted ENIAC into a stored-program computer.
What this means is, instead of having to change cables and physical connections in ENIAC to change the formula it was calculating, they could now just change its memory, or its 'software'. The apps that you use on your phone and computer are direct descendants of this idea. Have a machine with no specific behaviour defined in hardware and let the software change how it behaves. For all practical purposes, ENIAC was the first stored-program digital computer.
And the six women? They were the first software programmers as we know them.
Jean's story is just a thread that we're following, but she's not the only one. Betty Snyder, who Jean seems very fond of, invented breakpoints in debugging. Kay was apparently gifted at crafting loops.
In making ENIAC a stored-program computer, they had interacted with a lot of great minds - the ferocious John Von Neumann for one. And he happened to be working on another little project at the same time - the Manhattan Project.
And so ENIAC was used to simulate the first hydrogen bomb.
The waves that this ancestor-computer made are lapping at our feet even now. And these bright, young mathematicians, they were at the center of it all.
But while Von Neumann is one of the first names a Computer Engineer learns about, and Eckert and Mauchley became minor celebrities, these six ladies faded into obscurity. I don't mean hidden away in dusty academic journals. I mean removed completely. They were remembered vaguely as 'refrigerator models'.
In 1996, on the 50th anniversary of ENIAC's creation, none of them were going to be invited to the celebratory dinner. Again.
But Kathy Kleiman, in 1984 had had a moment of stereotype threat.
KATHY
Kathy: "As the classes I took advanced, the number of women dropped, significantly.
And so by the time we got to the advanced classes there was one, me, or maybe 2 women in the classroom. And I began to wonder, did women belong in computing?"
As a student in Harvard, Kathy loved programming. But as she searched for role models, she found few. Two, actually. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. Kathy refused to believe that through 200 years of computing history, there were only two women of note.
It was one day when she was looking through pictures of ENIAC that she noticed the women, standing head to head with the men in the photographs. Determined to find out who they were, she went to a historian at the Computer History Museum, where she was told that they were "models".
Something was not right.
Kathy: "They didn't look like models to me, these women look like they know exactly what they're doing"
Kathy embarked on a mission. In fact, it would become her doctoral thesis. She ended up seeing them, for the first time, at a dinner marking the 40th anniversary of ENIAC. She had come across many groups of men discussing the work they had done. But also a group of four women.
Kathy: "I listened closely, and they were talking about the bug in their program the night before ENIAC's big demonstration."
She spent the evening learning their story. For the first time, someone from the outside knew the role these women had played.
Fast-forward to 10 years after this dinner, when the big 50th anniversary was coming up, Kathy, now an attorney, was excited to meet them again.
Kathy: "And so I called the University, I found the Dean who was responsible for the anniversary, it was going to be a big deal. 50th anniversary of the first modern computer.
And when I asked who was coming from the ENIAC programmers, he didn't know who I was talking about."
Something had to be done.
Kathy applied for a grant and set about recording their story. She made a documentary, where she interviews them and uncovers their role in history first-hand.
The documentary, called 'The ENIAC Programmers', released in 2013, 67 years after the ENIAC press conference. In that time, a lot had changed.
Jean had left the industry to raise a family and ended up as a real estate agent. She had died in 2011.
But thanks to Kathy Kleiman, she had received her due. Jean Bartik, while she was alive, was nominated to the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows in 2008, where she claimed her space among other computing legends like Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniack, Dennis Ritchie and Tim Berners-Lee.
This is a reality that Kathy directly created, not by telling Jean's story, but by seeking out her own.
[pause]
Today, a modest cellphone runs 20 million times faster than ENIAC. The IBM-built Summit supercomputer runs over 400 trillion times faster. And just as ENIAC once computed hydrogen bombs designed to kill people, Summit is currently calculating how to save them. It's using its big head to simulate how a certain virus folds its proteins, and helping us find a cure.
While these machines have always been superhuman, their contexts are consistently human. And if we squint a bit, past their massive heads, we can see the people that built them. And maybe tell their stories.
Here's the thing. There are always multiple stories to tell. Whether it's in the past, or about the future, or in the present.
And stories are not just fantasies. They shape the very core of who we are. There are multiple occasions in everyone's life where we have to choose who we want to be. And at those points, we need to carefully consider the stories we tell ourselves.
Going back to the whole thing about stereotype threat, let's run a new experiment, this time with an Indian person. Let's call him, I dunno, Babhijit, and let's tell him that he has to make a podcast.
At this point, we conveniently split the Universe into two.
Voice 1: Podcasts are just another Internet cliche and I'm just another random guy broadcasting into the ether with an over-inflated sense for how interesting these stories are. I waste my time and others time. Creating is pretentious and sincerity is weakness. I should probably just shut up.
Or
Voice 2: I know it's not perfect, but I want to make something. I have a curious mind and a voice. I have the tools and skills to create an experience - a tiny bubble of reality. And if I can, I should.
I wonder which Universe Jean Bartik would have chosen.
Jean: "I believe that we're about as happy as we choose to be, and I choose to be happy."
Thank you for listening to this, the second episode of the Unsung.
This podcast was written, narrated, and edited by me, Abhijit Shylanath.
Original music was composed by me as mudeth.
Both maths and math are used as contractions for dramatic effect.
Thanks to Kathy Kleiman, for her patience and for the work she does. When she is not inspiring women programmers, she is also involved in the fight for electronic rights, freedom, privacy and other such noble ideas at Washington College of Law.
The ENIAC programmers documentary can be viewed at eniacprogrammers.org.
More information and references can be found at unsung.mudeth.org. If you enjoyed listening to the podcast, please send me a message, or leave a rating. You can find me @podcastunsung on Twitter.
Goodbye.
