Most people do not even realize this, but the first supercomputer was programmed entirely by 6 WOMEN! I feel like if more people know about this, that women actually pioneered computer programming.
The University of Pennsylvania formally dedicates their room-filling computer that the press has dubbed a 'Giant Brain.' The six main programmers, all women, have initially programmed ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) to run computations on the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb. Did you read that….ONLY WOMEN programmed the computer initally!!
This is amazing, and I had never known about this. I am a huge computer nerd for over 30 years, and this was something you almost never hear about.
ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The total cost was about $487,000, equivalent to $6,887,000 in 2017
By the end of its operation in 1956, ENIAC contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. That is crazy!
It weighed more than 30 short tons wow!! (27 t), was roughly 2.4 m × 0.9 m × 30 m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167 m2 (1,800 ft2) and consumed 150 kWof electricity. This power requirement led to the rumor that whenever the computer was switched on, lights in Philadelphia dimmed.
And also the Input was possible from an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch was used for output. Also these cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, such as the IBM 405, that was probably awesome at the time for sure! While ENIAC had no system to store memory in its inception, these punch cards could be used for external memory storage. In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC