Jean Bartik

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean Bartik (b. December 27, 1924) was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer.

She was born Betty Jean Jennings in Gentry County, Missouri in 1924 and attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, majoring in mathematics. In 1945, she was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to work for Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground. When the ENIAC computer was developed for the purpose of calculating ballistics trajectories, she was selected to be one of its first programmers. Bartik later became part of a group charged with converting the ENIAC into a stored program computer; in the original implementation, ENIAC was programmed by setting dials and changing cable connections. She went on to work on the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers.

In 1997 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers