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Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age

The largest part of the ENIAC team by far were the peo­ple that were actu­ally build­ing the thing. And it’s inter­est­ing they’ve been for­got­ten by his­tory, because although their job titles were wire­men, tech­ni­cians, and assem­blers, being a busi­ness his­to­rian I looked up the account­ing records, and some­times they spell out the pay­roll. You sud­denly see all these women’s names like Ruth, Jane, Alice, Dorothy, Caroline, Eleanor show­ing up.

Kay Mauchly on Finding Out about ENIAC, Programming It, and Marrying John Mauchly

Then we were told we had to learn how to oper­ate this machine. Well, how do you go about that? And some­body from Moore School gave us a whole stack of blue­prints, and these were the wiring dia­grams for all the pan­els. And they said, Here, you can fig­ure out how the machine works and then fig­ure out how to pro­gram it.”