Udo Moll

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 method of programming computers. At that point, the women programmers were never introduced; they remained invisible. After 1948, their pioneering work was forgotten for decades.

The composer Udo Moll was accompanied by the story of the ENIAC girls more or less constantly since 2015: different versions of this piece emerged, ranging from solo electronica to ensemble and even a radiophonic sound-art version. This cycle of compositions gets finalized with the release of the double CD "ENIAC girls". Contained are the ensemble version from 2017 und the radiophonic piece from 2018. The Radio Version (produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur) won the special achievement award of the jury at the Prix Marulic - International Radio Festival run by Croatian Radiotelevision HRT. Field recordings of historic computers, oral-history interviews, experimental voice techniques, percussion, modular synthesizers, Hammond organ - Udo Molls remarkable work amalgamates all that into an electro-acoustic oratorio about the dawn of the thinking machines.

"Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a dog !"- Betty Snyder Holberton, ENIAC programmer 1945