Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli recalls computing in 1946:

     "We did have desk calculators at that time, mechanical and driven with electric motors, that could do simple arithmetic. You'd do a multiplication and when the answer appeared, you had to write it down to reenter it into the machine to do the next calculation. We were preparing a firing table for each gun, with maybe 1,800 simple trajectories. To hand-compute just one of these trajectories took 30 or 40 hours of sitting at a desk with paper and a calculator. As you can imagine, they were soon running out of young women to do the calculations.
     Actually, my title working for the ballistics project was `computer.' The idea was that I not only did arithmetic but also made the decision on what to do next. ENIAC made me, one of the first `computers,' obsolete.

On computing in 1996, Kay says:

     I love that it's a perfectly normal thing for kids. My 5-year-old granddaughter is not amazed by computers at all. I guess the amazement will come when she realizes it won't do everything in the world.

     Quotations are from:

• Strauss, Robert. When Computers Were Born; Technology: They Began Humbly Enough -- The War Department Needed to be Able to Calculate Numbers Quickly. Who Knew the Impact of the Revolution?, the Times Mirror    Company, 1996.
• Winegrad, Dilys and Akera, Atsushi. A Short History of the Second America Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Almanac, Jan. 30, 1996, Vol. 42, No. 18.

Alice Burks has coauthored numerous articles on ENIAC and the history of computers with her husband, Arthur Burks, a computer scientist who was part of the ENIAC team.

• Sankaran, Neeraja. Looking Back at ENIAC: Computers Hit Half-Century Mark, The Scientist, Aug. 21, 1995, Vol. 9, No. 16, p. 3.
• Burks, Alice, and Burks, Arthur. The First Electronic computer: The Atanasoff Story, University of Michigan Press, 1988.
• Winegrad, Dilys and Akera, Atsushi. A Short History of the Second America Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Almanac, Jan. 30, 1996, Vol. 42, No. 18.

    In 1918, Edith left to enroll in the EE program at MIT, earning her MSc. degree (the first degree ever awarded by that department to a woman) in June 1919. In 1919, she took a job as a computor for GE in Schenectady, NY, and in 1921 filed a patent for a "graphical calculator" to be employed in solving electric power transmission line problems. Also in 1921, she took a leave from GE to take a position as a professor of physics at the U.S.-founded Constantinople Women's College in Turkey.
Returning to GE in 1922 as a salaried electrical engineer, Edith continued there till her first retirement in 1945. In 1947, after a brief first retirement on a farm in Maryland, she accepted an EE professorship at the University of Texas, Austin, and became the first woman to teach engineering there. She worked there as a full professor until her second retirement in 1956.

    In a March 14, 1948 interview by the Daily Texan, she commented on the future prospects for women in engineering: "There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work." A New York Times article of Feb. 19, 1956, said, "She believes that women may help solve today's critical need for technical manpower."

    Dr. James E. Brittain's paper, "From Computor to Electrical Engineer--the Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke," sheds light on how she was a pioneer for women in both engineering and computing:

     "Edith Clarke's engineering career had as its central theme the development and dissemination of mathematical methods that tended to simplify and reduce the time spent in laborious calculations in solving problems in the design and operation of electrical power systems. She translated what many engineers found to be esoteric mathematical methods into graphs or simpler forms during a time when power systems were becoming more complex and when the initial efforts were being made to develop electromechanical aids to problem solving. As a woman who worked in an environment traditionally dominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could perform at least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achievements provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women with aspirations to become career engineers."
 

• Brittain, Dr. James E. From Computor to Electrical Engineer -- the Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke. IEEE     Transactions on Education, Vol. E28, No. 4, Nov. 1985.
• Gusen, Aaron. Looking Back: Edith Clarke. IEEE Potentials, Feb. 1994. (This paper is the source for the information     provided above.)

• A.I. Forsythe, T.A. Keenan, E. I. Organick, and W. Stenberg, Computer Science: A First Course. Wiley & Sons,     1969 (1st ed.), 1975 (2nd ed.)
• E.I. Organick, A.I. Forsythe, and R.P.Plummer, Programming Language Structures. Academic Press, 1978.

    Fox was involved in several professional groups, especially the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Federation for Information Processing Societies (AFIPS). She was the first secretary of AFIPS."

Quoted from: Margaret Fox Papers (CBI 45), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

• Winegrad, Dilys and Akera, Atsushi. A Short History of the Second America Revolution, University of Pennsylvania     Almanac, Jan. 30, 1996, Vol. 42, No. 18.

• Nies, Kevin A. From Sorceress to Scientist: Biographies of Women Physical Scientists. Lives of Women Scientists, Vol. 1. California Video Institute, P.O. Box 572019, Tarzana, CA, 1990. ISBN 1-880211-01-7.

• Erna Hoover Biography at MIT's Invention Dimension

From the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive:

     Her first research topic was number theory, but she became discouraged on finding that her results had already been proved by Dickson. For a while Rósa wrote poetry, but around 1930 she was encouraged to return to mathematics by Kalmár. He suggested Rósa examine Gödel's work, and in a series of papers she became a founder of recursive function theory. Rósa wrote Recursive Functions in 1951, which was the first book on the topic and became a standard reference. In 1952 Kleene described Rósa Péter in a paper in Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. as ``the leading contributor to the special theory of recursive functions." From the mid 1950's she applied recursive function theory to computers. In 1976 her last book was on this topic: Recursive Functions in Computer Theory.

    In the mid-1970s Winters became active in SHARE, an International Business Machines (IBM) computer user group. In 1976 she joined SHARE's Human Factors Project, a group dedicated to educating members of SHARE and employees of IBM about the importance of human factors in the design of hardware and, especially, software and conducting research into human factors and software appraisal tools. Winters became deputy manager of the project in 1978 and served as project manager from 1983 to 1987. She also served on the Interactive Systems (INTERSYS) Task Force from 1979-1982 and was a primary author of the task force's report. She became vice chair of the ASCII/EPCDIC Committee (later, a task force) in 1987 and manager of the Integrated Technology Group in 1988. Winters also belonged to the Human Factors Society and the
Association for Computing Machinery."

Quoted from: Joan M. Winters Papers (CBI 22), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.