ENIAC, an early electronic computer, gets a makeover
The first modern-style code ever executed on a computer was written in the 1940s by a woman named Klára Dán von Neumann—or Klári to her family and friends. And the historic program she wrote was used to develop thermonuclear weapons. In this season, we peer into a fascinating moment in the postwar U.S. through the prism of Dán von Neumann’s work.
KATIE HAFNER: You heard it–Tom Haigh hired a handwriting analyst for the book he co-authored, ENIAC in Action. That’s how thorough a scholar Tom is–and his meticulous scholarship accrued to our benefit, because it meant we got to see Klári at work, right there on the page. At Los Alamos they were still using those punch-card machines we heard about in the last episode. Besides being slow and finicky, they could really only do simple math. But this wasn’t a new problem. In fact…
KATIE HAFNER: That’s Nic Lewis, a historian of technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory. You’ve heard him in earlier episodes. NIC LEWIS: Goldstine later described it. He said that their chat was very convivial up to the point that von Neumann learned about the ENIAC. And then suddenly it turned into the oral exam for a PhD in mathematics.
Johnny was keen to get a look. So on August 7th, 1944, shortly after grilling Herman Goldstine, Johnny arrived at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s where the ENIAC was being built. That simple difference between on and off is how we communicate with machines. It’s kind of all they recognize. Punch card machines did it with patterns of holes in the cards, and computers today do it with endless strings of binary code, 1s and 0s, and the ENIAC did it with vacuum tubes. 18,000 of them. A huge rack of these light bulb-looking things ready to be turned on or off. And because it was all electronic, the ENIAC had the potential to be faster than any other machine around.
KATIE HAFNER: So even though the ENIAC could spit out results unbelievably quickly, telling it what to do could take weeks. The operators untangled the rat’s nest of wires and figured out which cables to plug into which jacks. CLAIRE L. EVANS: Operation was really an afterthought. There were no, like, instructions.
KATIE HAFNER: In her memoir, Klári has an entire chapter called “The Computer,” where she lays out Johnny’s dream. Here’s Eva Szabo reading from it… KATIE HAFNER: Johnny understood that a computer shouldn’t have to be totally reconfigured and put back together every time it needed to do something new. There had to be a way to store instructions on the machine.
ANANYO BHATTACHARYA: All of these machines have something in common, which is called the von Neumann architecture. And this is the idea that you can store programs along with data in memory. Uh, you don't need to rewire the entire machine every time you want to run a new program. And so we can run thousands of different apps on our smart phones without having to unscrew the back of it and start messing around with electronics.
THOMAS HAIGH: But then they were like, hey, wait, we have thousands of digits of memory that can be read at higher electronic speeds here. THOMAS HAIGH: So as they go, they make little tweaks and improvements, but you don't change those things from one job to another. All you do is change the switches on the function table.
KATIE HAFNER: Adele Goldstine was married to Herman, the guy who told Johnny about the ENIAC in the first place. Like Klári, Adele had a gift for mathematics. Unlike Klári, Adele had an actual degree in it. Adele was an expert on all things ENIAC. She trained the ENIAC six and she even wrote the user manual for the machine after it became operational. And Klári and Adele…
KATIE HAFNER: That’s Nathan Ensmenger, a historian of technology at Indiana University, Bloomington. We later learned that John von Neumann had not only put together this flowchart, but he popularized the use of flowcharts in computer programming. This was a whole new way of using flowcharts. KATIE HAFNER: To write code, Klári was using flowcharts—these visual representations of what a program should do.
KATIE HAFNER: It was incredibly detail-oriented work. But Johnny believed that in creating the flowcharts, he was doing the hard part. As for the coding… KATIE HAFNER: And so there's this tension between clearly, I mean, you look at the work, the actual work she did versus this self-deprecating woman.KATIE HAFNER: Tom Haigh is right–we’ll never get the whole story. But it’s important to note that Klári actually did have some mathematical training. At the beginning of 1947, before she was hired as a coder, she’d taken calculus at Columbia University at Johnny’s suggestion.
All those bugs to fix and no search engine, no online forums, no developer community, no technical conferences with birds-of-a-feather breakout sessions, not even—actually, definitely not—“ENIAC coding for DUMMIES.”NATHAN ENSMENGER: It becomes clear that, that software is hard. That whatever it is that uh, needs to be done to make a computer work, whether that's kind of planning or design or programming or operation, that that is, that is quite difficult.
JANET ABBATE: It's really much more interesting to rethink history in general—for example, to rethink this relationship between hardware and software.JANET ABBATE: …and to rethink ideas about skill and what's simple and what's complicated and what's important and what's routine. She shows us that their work—the seemingly routine, repetitious work of translating pen and paper calculations to code—was creative and complex. And more broadly, Klári might be a good case study of one of the most crucial forces pushing science forward, and that is chance.
KATIE HAFNER: It was this early period of undervaluation that made the field of coding available to Klári and other women. It’s bittersweet.
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