Udo Moll
ENIAC Girls
Seventy years ago, computers were as big as swimming pools and were programmed by country girls. ENIAC, the world’s first fully electronic, vacuum-tube-based universal computing machine, sported a weight of 27 tonnes and used 18,000 vacuum tubes for calculating. And, each day, at least two of those vacuum tubes gave out. When this machine was presented to the world public in 1946, six young women, most of them maths students from the rural Midwest of the USA, had spent three years inventing a me…