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When Je
A few months after she arrived, a memo was circulated among the women about six job openings to work on the mysterious machine that was behind locked doors on the first floor of Pe
When she got to the meeting, Goldstine asked her what she knew about electricity. “I said that I had had a course in physics and knew that E equaled IR,” she recalled, referring to Ohm’s Law, which defines how a flow of electrical current is related to voltage and resistance. “No, no,” Goldstine replied, “I don’t care about that, but are you afraid of it?”26 The job involved plugging in wires and throwing a lot of switches, he explained. She said that she wasn’t afraid. While she was being interviewed, Adele Goldstine came in, looked at her, and nodded. Je
In addition to Jean Je
In the summer of 1945, the six women were sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground to learn how to use IBM punch cards and wire up plug boards. “We had great discussions about religion, our families, politics, and our work,” McNulty recalled. “We never ran out of things to say to each other.”28 Je
After six weeks of training, the six women programmers consigned their boyfriends to memory archives and returned to Pe
Snyder described making careful diagrams and charts for each new configuration of cables and switches. “What we were doing then was the begi
One day Je
Almost every afternoon, they did. “He was a marvelous teacher,” according to Je
Around the same time that Hopper was doing so at Harvard, the women of ENIAC were developing the use of subroutines. They were fretting that the logical circuits did not have enough capacity to compute some trajectories. It was McNulty who pushed a solution. “Oh, I know, I know, I know,” she said excitedly one day. “We can use a master programmer to repeat code.” They tried it and it worked. “We began to think about how we could have subroutines, and nested subroutines, and all that stuff,” recalled Je
Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Je