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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.”

ENIAC Programmers Keynote at WITI New York Network Meeting 1998

I applied and went over and they just talked to us a lit­tle bit. We nev­er saw the machine or any­thing. So then they called us in and Herman Goldstine, who was the Army offi­cer liai­son com­ing in from Aberdeen, inter­viewed me. So Herman said to me, What do you think of electricity?”

So I said, Well, I had a physics course and I knew that E=IR.”

So he said, No, I don’t mean that. I don’t care about that. Are you afraid of it?”