You may not know that the first programmers were women. Women have made many valuable contributions to technology, although they are often left out of the history books. This is changing slowly. The first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace, who was indeed a visionary for what computers could be. Another woman named Katherine Johnson made calculations for NASA. Take a look at some influential women in technology.
1. Williamina Fleming
While men at Harvard College Observatory were using telescopes to study the stars in the 1800s, they needed someone to make sense of the data and numbers they gathered. Men didn’t do clerical work at the time, and the head of the Observatory, Edward Pickering, asked his housemaid, Williamina Fleming, to crunch the numbers. She did so, and she led a team of 80 women who did all of the computations needed.
2. Women of ENIAC
It was widely believed that computation and programming was a job for women. In the first half of the 20th century, Harvard’s computers became a group of women who were mathematicians who would become the team for NASA and the Jet propulsion Laboratory. They did calculations plotting ballistic trajectories, and two men eventually built a machine called ENIAC that could carry out the same measures. However, the women programmed the ENIAC machine. Their work in the 1940s paved the way for the first software program.
3. Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper also started in the military in the late 1940s. She worked at the Harward Computation lab and programmed the Mark I computer for the military. She later worked for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp as a senior mathematician and helped develop the Univac I computer for business. She created the first software that could translate arithmetic into language, and she was one of the architects of COBOL, the computer language still used today.
4. Annie Easley
Annie Easley became a computer programmer working for an agency that would become NASA. She ran simulations and was one of just four African Americans working there. She was inspirational and encouraged people of color to enter STEM fields. Her work involved energy conversion systems, and she developed and implemented the code that led to the development of the battery used in the first hybrid cars.