hello everybody and welcome back our story today is about the women of eniac the six women who helped program that machine we talked about that had been made at the University of Pennsylvania by preser eard uh and John Mockley there's John Mockley right in the middle leaning against the post preser eard playing with the dials and behind them is a woman and her name is Jean Jennings Jean Jennings remember that name she's one of the Six Women of eniac she was born in atanus Grove Missouri a town of 104 population except for when she left it became 103 uh her father taught in a one room Schoolhouse her mother helped Tut to the kids in the neighborhood in algebra even though her mother was a eth grade Dropout her mother had learned math so she could help teach it Jean was the uh star pitcher in fact the only girl on the school softball team and there were seven children uh and she was the sixth one in her family all of them went to college particular she went to a college called Northwest State Teachers College in Missouri uh the tuition was about $76 a year that was back when America really uh appreciate it the value of everybody being able to get an education to be able to afford a higher education it was you know as we were leading into World War II and we knew that our our success would depend on an educated population Northwest uh uh State College still exists the tuition is now $144,000 a year for instate students uh Jean Jennings at first wanted to study journalism but she didn't like her advisor and she realized or she felt that math was more interesting it was more exciting and she became pretty good at math very good at math and when she graduated her teacher showed her a flyer that had been sent to the teachers college and it was a flyer that was sort of a help wanted ad it said wanted women with degrees in mathematics women are being offered scientific engineering job where formerly men were preferred in other words you know no women wanted for a while in those type of jobs but now as we headed towards World War II they were looking for women especially women in science and math so the ad said now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering you will find that the slogan there is women want it well she sent off her application and one day she got a telegram from uh a group at the University of Pennsylvania saying come join us you're going to be hired she had never left the state of Missouri but when she got the telegram she boarded that next day the midnight Wabash Express to Pennsylvania needless to say she said they were shocked that I got so quickly she becomes part of what are called the computers back then the phrase computers was used to refer to people who did calculations they computed things such as the missile trajectories and almost all of the computers in the room uh at the University of Pennsylvania were women and they did the calculations on the Blackboard and on paper and they were called the computers but eventually six of them got tapped six of them got tapped to be part of a secret program that was going to make it so that you didn't have to do those calculations on paper you could do it on the machine that John Mockley and preser urate were building behind locked doors at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania the six women were Jean Jennings the woman we talked about upper left Marilyn westoff Ruth lman Betty Snider Francis bass and K mcnalty and they get sent to Aberdine Proving Ground in Maryland which was a a base an Army artillery base where they could be secretly trained in how to understand the engineering of this new computer that was being built they had a wonderful time I've always thought of make a great movie in fact I've pitched this movie but nobody's picked it up of the Six Women of eniac when they get to the Aberdine Proving Ground they're put in cabins together and they meet a lot of young Army uh recruits Army enlisted men and they each have wonderful boyfriends one of them I think Jean Jennings found a boyfriend from buuy Mississippi they had a favorite drink which was a Tom Collins I think it's made out of Jin and some lime and soda whatever and they would drink Tom Collins's in the mass Hall there with their boyfriends but they also got to know each other very well and they had never come into contact close contact with anybody from any other religion this is uh Jean Jennings talking but despite our differences or perhaps because of them we really liked each other so as I picture these Six Women of eniac drinking Tom Collins having wonderful love affairs with enlisted men at Aberdine Proving Ground is like one of those Old World War II platoon movies with men where there's people of each ethnic and racial background and that's what these six women wore at one point they decide prer eard and John Mockley that they're going to demonstrate for the public eniac this is after uh the women had figured out all the cabling and the programming and so these women said about figuring out how are you going to do missile trajectories but other things such as uh weather but especially a secret one which was how to figure out the atom bomb and how it would explode and at one point Jean Jennings is working in her office upstairs with uh uh uh one of the other uh women of eniac and John Mockley walks in they never met Mockley before he'd stayed behind the locked doors on the ground floor but he walked in because there was some problem with the roof and he says hi my name is John moley I was just checking to see if the ceiling is falling in and Jean Jennings said to him boy are we glad to see you tell us how this blasted accumulator Works in other words how does this part of the machine that accumulates memory of numbers were and Mockley answered the questions talked to the two women and said well my office is next door so anytime I'm in my office just come by and ask questions and they started to do so almost every afternoon they would meet with Mockley and he would teach him about the machine when they were doing the preparation for this demonstration for when they were going to take eniac public John Mockley knew it was going to be really important to get it right and at one point he came by the room with Jean Jennings and her friends and brought a bottle of apricot brandy I don't know why he thought that would help them figure out the mathematics faster for the demonstration but Jennings loved it she said it was delicious and from that day forward I always kept a bottle of apricot brandy in my cupboard what they did was they tried to do a demonstration a missile trajectory and the night before they were supposed to do it they still had one glitch in the program because it would perfectly calculate the trajectory of the missile but then when the missile was supposed to hit the ground it would keep calculating it would show it would keep doing the numer the numbers and calculate the trajectory even after it had hit the target and finally uh Jean Jennings uh bark and others figured out a way staying up late at night how to make sure that there was a zero function that turned it off at the right point it was an absolutely successful demonstration page one of the New York Times and here's the inside page of the New York Times it shows the picture of them working on eniac they showed it off to all of the press and they said it was a machine that would think but like adah love lace Dean Jennings didn't think that machines would be able to actually think she thought they would be able to do what we programmed them to do not come up with ideas on their own so like a Lovel she says for the story The aniac wasn't a brain in any sense it couldn't reason as computers still cannot reason but it could give people more data for reasoning uh that evening after the demonstration it was a beautiful Gayla dinner it was held in Houston Hall one of the great Halls at Penn by candle light an oldfashioned Hall there were all sorts of dignitaries generals from the Army top politicians came and it was February 14th it was Valentine's Day but jean Jennings and the other women who had programmed it they weren't invited to the dinner and years later they still felt insulted that they were just considered clerical people who had done the programming but that began to change when John moley and prer eord left pen and they took the idea for eniac and started a company called univac company that is still in various incarnations around today uh Unisys Barry brand started as univac and they realized then that the hardware wasn't the big thing the big thing was the software so Jean Jennings now Jean Jennings bartic uh she's there on the right that's her holding vacuum tubes uh and the circuit board there she gets hired to help do the programming uh of univac and for the company all of the people who had worked all the women who had worked on eniac get hired by preser eard and John Mockley and they hired Grace Hopper too the woman who had done the programming of the mark one up at Harvard uh John monley also tried to hire one of the six K mcnalty but he ended up proposing marriage to her so even though she helped program the machine she also became his wife and one of the co-founders of univac so that's the story uh there wonderful people the Six Women of univac they live to a ripe old age and if you Google them you can find a lot of videos of them talking about how they help discover writing new programs like cobal and others that it wasn't the hardware that would distinguish a machine it was the software that would be most important and finally they got their due in history thanks