Jean Bartik

Betty Jennings (left) at the ENIAC computer

Jean Bartik , born as Elisabeth " Betty " Jean Jennings (born December 27, 1924 near Stanburry , Missouri ; † March 23, 2011 in New York City ) was one of the six American programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) , the first electronic universal computer.

Career

Childhood and youth

Born Elisabeth Jean Jennings on December 27, 1924, Jean Bartik grew up on her parents' farm in Missouri. She was the sixth of seven children. Father and mother both worked as farmers on their own farm to earn a living. Her father always wanted her to be a teacher, but Jean Bartik had other plans and wanted to leave Missouri. At the age of 16, in 1941, Bartik graduated from Stanburry High School and then attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Missouri.

Working life

In 1946 she married William Bartik, an engineer who worked for the United States Department of Defense . She dropped her first name Betty, to which she never had much connection. Since then she has been known as Jean Bartik and is mostly mentioned under this name, especially in literature.

In 1951 she retired from professional life for 16 years and devoted herself to family life. She and her husband raised their three children. In addition to a son, Mitch, the couple had two girls, Mary and Jane. In 1968, Jean and William divorced after 22 years of marriage.

In 1967 Jean Bartik returned to professional life and until 1985 wrote technical articles on computer science for Auerbach Publishers and David Publishing. She also worked as a programmer and taught in the department. In 1985, Jean Bartik became unemployed at the age of 61 and could no longer find a job in the IT industry . Because of this, she moved into the real estate industry and worked as a broker in New Jersey for the next 25 years .

University career

At Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (later Northwest Missouri State University) Jean Bartik made a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 1945. At the time of World War II , Bartik was the only woman majoring in mathematics on her course. She then attended the University of Pennsylvania . In 1967 she received her Masters degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2002 Jean Bartik received an honorary doctorate from Northwest Missouri State University.

Services

Work in World War II - ENIAC

Jean Bartik graduated from the university during the Second World War. Immediately after her studies, at the age of 20, Bartik was hired by the US Army on the recommendation of one of her teachers . There she played a key role in supporting the ENIAC project until 1946 . The project was initiated by the University of Pennsylvania . Bartik welcomed this very much, now that she had the chance to leave Missouri and go to Philadelphia .

The ENIAC was the first electronic universal computer that was developed by the army and was intended to be used for war purposes. It was used by the US Army to calculate ballistic tables that were supposed to calculate the trajectories of military projectiles. Bartik worked on the universal computer with five colleagues who also played a pioneering role. The women worked on the device without any manuals or records. The ENIAC was programmed by connecting the individual components with cables and setting the desired operations on rotary switches. Jean Bartik developed important program parts of the ENIAC, which made it possible that the planned calculations could be carried out. The so-called "ENIAC women" and Jean Bartik's colleagues included: Kathleen Antonelli , Adele Goldstine , Betty Snyder , Marlyn Wescoff , Frances Spence (née Bilas) and Ruth Teitelbaum . You had previously performed ballistic calculations on mechanical desktop computers for the military . The first test phases of the ENIAC began in November 1945, and in February 1946 the ENIAC was presented to the public.

Jean Bartik's achievements at ENIAC, and those of her ENIAC colleagues, were only recognized decades later (see awards ).

The time after the Second World War

In 1947 the ENIAC computer was moved to the military site in Aberdeen, but Jean Bartik did not move with Marilyn Wescof either. Betty Snyder also finished her work at ENIAC shortly afterwards. Like Jean Bartik before, she switched to the newly founded Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation , where both made a name for themselves in software development: As a team, the two women worked on the performance of ENIAC and all program sequences. After the war, Bartik and her team converted the ENIAC into a programmed machine. This allowed larger, more demanding programs to be written. In 1949 Bartik programmed the BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer), the successor to ENIAC, with the aim of making computers more user-friendly. In the 1950s she designed the logic and the backup system for the UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer). It was the first computer manufactured in the United States for commercial use. After she had learned at ENIAC and had sufficiently studied the structure of computers, she particularly enjoyed working on UNIVAC I.

Jean Bartik's work also had a great influence on the development of the FORTRAN programming language , which she helped to develop in a team of programmers.

Awards

Only decades after the development of the first computer was the work of women appreciated. Between 1990 and 2010 Jean Bartik received high awards:

In 1997 Jean Bartik and her five programming colleagues were inducted into the “Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame” and in the same year received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association of Women in Computing . In 2008 she received the Computer History Museum Fellows Award and became a member of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View , California. She received her last award in 2009, the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award .

In addition, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2002 from Northwest Missouri State University, which later named her computer museum after her, and her person in the documentary "Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II (2010)."

The Drupal content management system has named its standard theme (the graphical user interface) after Jean Bartik.

literature

• Autumn Stanley: Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology . Rutgers University Press, USA 1995; ISBN 0-8135-2197-1
• Jeffrey R. Yost: The Computer Industry . Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport USA 2005, ISBN 0-313-32844-7

Web links

• Britannica encyclopedia
• Biography in "The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive" (English)
• Steve Lohr: Jean Bartik, Software Pioneer, Dies at 86 . In: New York Times
• Computer History Museum
• Evan Koblentz: Jean Bartik, last of the original ENIAC programmers, 86 . In: Computerworld blog
• Northwest Missouri State University
• Women in Computer Science
• Interview of the National Museum of American History with Jean Bartik and Frances E. Snyder Holberton (PDF; 1.4 MB)

Video of the Computer History Museum  - An interview with Jean Bartik, 2008 Video of the Computer History Museum  - Jean Bartik's path to ENIAC

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Autumn Stanley: Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology , p. 442.
2. ^ Columbia University , accessed January 8, 2013
3. ^ Northwest Missouri State University , accessed January 8, 2013
4. ↑ miss fidget.com , accessed January 8, 2012
5. ↑ Internet site Women in Computer Science ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 10, 2012 
6. ^ Article in the New York Times, April 7, 2011, accessed December 11, 2012.
7. ^ Britannica Encyclopedia , accessed November 27, 2012
8. ↑ Computer History Museum ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed on December 12, 2012 (with photo).  
9. ↑ Frauenweb.at ( Memento of the original from November 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 11, 2012.  
10. ↑ Women in the History of Computer Science ( Memento of the original from August 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 17, 2012.  
11. ↑ Internet site Women in Computer Science ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 10, 2012. 
12. ^ Women In Technology International - Hall of Fame , accessed December 5, 2012
13. ↑ Frauenweb.at ( Memento of the original from November 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 11, 2012  
14. ↑ about.com , accessed January 8, 2013
15. ^ Women In Technology International - Hall of Fame , accessed December 19, 2012
16. ↑ Introduction to Bartik theme , accessed on May 12, 2017