ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.

They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself.

It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.

Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.

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"