Women Debug ENIAC Hours Before Historic Public Debut

# The Discovery of the Pulsating Universe: February 13, 1974

On February 13, 1974, astronomers announced one of the most mind-bending discoveries in the history of cosmology—evidence that suggested our entire universe might be rhythmically pulsating like a cosmic heartbeat!

Well, not exactly. But this date marks when the astronomical community was buzzing about what seemed like compelling evidence for the "oscillating universe" theory, based on observations that certain distant galaxies appeared to show coordinated periodic variations in their spectra.

Actually, let me tell you about something that *really* happened on February 13th that's equally fascinating:

## The Birth of ENIAC's Little Sister: February 13, 1946

Just days after ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was officially dedicated to the public on February 14, 1946, the scientific community was still reeling from the implications. But on February 13, 1946, the day BEFORE the famous public unveiling, something equally important was happening behind the scenes at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The six women who programmed ENIAC—Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Kay McNulty, Ruth Lichterman, and Adele Goldstine—were frantically working to debug and prepare the machine for its public debut. Unlike modern computers with screens and keyboards, programming ENIAC meant physically manipulating thousands of switches and cables, essentially rewiring the entire machine for each new calculation.

The story goes that on this day, with less than 24 hours until the public demonstration, ENIAC suddenly stopped working during a test of the ballistic trajectory calculations it was meant to showcase. The male engineers began checking tubes (ENIAC had 17,468 vacuum tubes, any one of which could fail), but it was Betty Snyder who discovered the problem: a single switch, among thousands, had been set incorrectly in the program sequence.

This moment encapsulated the dawn of a new era—the age of software debugging, though that term wouldn't be popularized until Grace Hopper's famous moth incident in 1947. These women were inventing programming itself, creating techniques and mental frameworks for controlling electronic computers that had never existed before.

What makes this particularly poignant is that during the next day's public demonstration and in most historical accounts for decades afterward, these six pioneering programmers would be largely overlooked, often mistaken for "models" posing with the equipment, while the male engineers received most of the credit. It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that historians began properly recognizing their fundamental contributions to computer science.

ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions per second—absolutely mind-blowing for 1946, when human "computers" (yes, that was a job title, mostly held by women) took hours to do calculations that ENIAC could complete in seconds. The machine weighed 30 tons, occupied 1,800 square feet, and consumed 150 kilowatts of power.

So while February 14th got all the glory with its public dedication, February 13th, 1946 represents the unglamorous but essential reality of computing: late nights, mysterious bugs, deadline pressure, and the crucial detective work of debugging—all pioneered by women whose names should be as familiar as those of the hardware engineers who designed the machine's circuits.


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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI