Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by LetsGetTechnicl on Thursday March 19, 2026 @12:30PM (#47442034)

Thank you for highlighting the contributions of women in computing, especially at it's inception! That is so easily forgotten or intentionally ignored in the age of the "tech bro"

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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by adrian_b on Friday March 20, 2026 @01:35AM (#47450878)

There were other programmers before those of ENIAC, but they also included women, like Grace Hopper, who later had an important role in the development of programming languages.

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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by DaleBiagio on Friday March 20, 2026 @05:20AM (#47452269)

Hopper's trajectory from the Mark I to FLOW-MATIC to COBOL is one of the great arcs in computing.

She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd because "computers don't understand English."

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Re:Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80 by DaleBiagio on Friday March 20, 2026 @05:19AM (#47452261)

The ENIAC women's story is especially striking because they were classified as "sub-professional".

The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical.

That framing took decades to reverse.

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