Born: 2 March 1922, United States
Died: 18 July 2012
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Frances Bilas
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In the 1940s, Kathleen Antonelli, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances “Betty” Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum collaborated to program ENIAC, the world’s first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. They had to learn to program without a programming language or tools, because they simply did not exist yet. But from the first demonstration on February 15, 1946—which Betty and Betty Jean wrote the program for—they received no recognition. The programmers were not even invited to the gala dinner afterward for “government and scientific men,” as reported by The New York Times. Herman Goldstine, who oversaw the project for the U.S. Army, claimed that he and his wife Adele—who was a programmer and did write the original technical manual for the ENIAC—had programmed that first successful demonstration for the VIPs, which Betty Jean later declared a “boldface lie.” Some historical images caption the women as models, rather than actual staff. When the U.S. Army used a War Department publicity photo for a recruitment ad, they cropped out the three women in the photo, and the department’s press releases credited a vague “group of experts” for the work, naming only Goldstine and ENIAC designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. This fundamentally ignored that the machine Mauchly and Eckert designed would never have functioned without the work of the programmers.
In the 1980s, Harvard University student Kathy Kleiman came across a photo of the women with ENIAC while researching her thesis on early programmers and software developers. When she enquired about the images, she was told the women were models, hired to make the image more appealing. Fortunately, Kleiman kept digging, discovered the women’s story and launched the ENIAC Programmers Project to get them the recognition they should have received decades earlier.