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Article: Women behind first computer programmed the future.
- Article from:
- The Boston Herald
- Article date:
- October 16, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Boston Herald. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The first computers were women.
"Computers" - as in people who compute - was the title given to a team of female mathematicians drafted by the U.S. Army in 1942 to calculate the trajectories of artillery shells.
"The Army believed that women working with numbers were more precise than men," said Kay Mauchly Antonelli, one of six women on the Army's trajectory-calculation' team , which in 1945was given a new, secret project.
Antonelli and the others were assigned to program the first true computer - the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC - invented at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly (her future husband) and J. ...