Proving Ground — A Story About the ENIAC Programmers

This week, a new, empowering book hit the shelves and it’s a read that we know you won’t be able to put down.

Book Description

“Fans of Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe and Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures are in for a treat” (Publisher’s Weekly) with this untold, World War II-era story of the six American women who programmed the world’s first modern computer.

After the end of World Ware II, the race for technological supremacy sped on. Top-secret research into ballistics and computing, begun during the war to aid those on the front lines, continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world’s first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer — better know as the ENIAC — even though there were no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. While most students of computer history are aware of this innovative machine, the great contributions of the women who programmed it were never told — until now.

Over the course of a decade, Kathy Kleiman met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers and recorded extensive interviews with the women about their work. PROVING GROUND restores these women…