Betty Jennings
Betty Jennings — born Elizabeth Jean Jennings (27 December 1924 – 29 March 2011), later Bartik — was an American mathematician, one of the six original ENIAC programmers, and the one who went furthest in the young field: she became lead programmer on both BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial American computers.
Life
Jennings grew up on a farm near Stanberry, Missouri — seventh of eight children — and put herself through Northwest Missouri State Teachers College on a mathematics degree, the only math major in her year. Rejected by IBM in 1945 (the interviewer reportedly told her she was too short), she took the Army's human-computer job in Philadelphia instead — and ended up programming a machine that made IBM nervous for a decade.
ENIAC and beyond
On ENIAC, Jennings became the team's technical anchor — the one who understood the machine most completely. She was lead on the push to make ENIAC operate in stored-program mode in 1948, the conversion that turned the rewired monster into a true stored-program computer.
When Mauchly and Eckert left Penn to form their own company, Jennings went with them and became programming lead on BINAC (1949) — she reportedly kept the machine running through its chaotic final demonstrations more by feel than by manual — and then on UNIVAC I, delivered to the Census Bureau in 1951. She later joked that she was the only person who had programmed all three of the era's pioneering machines.
She left the industry in 1951 to raise a family and spent the following decades in real estate — returning to computing work in the 1980s at Auerbach Publishers, documenting the very era she had created.
Legacy
- Wrote a memoir, Pioneer Programmer, published in 2013 — the fullest first-person account of the ENIAC six.
- Inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame (1997) with the other five.
- Received an honorary doctorate from Northwest Missouri State and a Computer Pioneer Award citation from the IEEE.
- Died in 2011, having lived to see herself transformed in public memory from "refrigerator lady" to founding programmer.