Top secret Rosies

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The "Top Secret Rosies" were six women who made history as some of the first computer programmers working on the ENIAC during World War II. On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The attack was intended to prevent the Americans from entering the war, but it had the opposite effect: the next day, the United States declared war on Japan and officially entered World War II. The war effort required the best professionals in every field, and in 1942, the government began recruiting women with mathematical knowledge, despite their being underestimated until then. Their work was to program the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), the second digital computer after Konrad Zuse's work. The ENIAC was a computer composed of 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 switches, 10,000 capacitors, 70,000 resistors, and 5 million soldered connections. An electronic conglomerate that consumed 160 kilowatts and weighed 27 tons, with an average temperature of 50 degrees Celsius. It could process around 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications per second. The ENIAC was a processor designed to calculate projectile trajectories during the war, as well as for industrial and military uses during the conflict. The programmers of the ENIAC made connections between cables in the computer through its six thousand terminals, gradually improving its use and achieving essential programming combinations to perform more calculations faster. In 1997, the "Top Secret Rosies" were included in the Women In Technology International Hall of Fame and have been valued with time, with studies and even a documentary, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II directed by LeAnn Erickson in 2010. The group of the "Top Secret Rosies" consisted of six brilliant women: Betty Snyder Holberton (1917-2001), a journalist who self-taught herself mathematics and physics. She later contributed to the development of the COBOL and Fortran programming languages alongside Grace Murray Hopper, and her contributions included developing the first generative programming system for UNIVAC and the first statistical analysis package used in the United States Census. Kathleen McNulty Mauchly (1921-2006), a mathematics and business expert who acquired programming knowledge through self-study. Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer (1922-2008), a graduate of Temple University, dedicated herself to commercial machines. She received information about a professor at the University of Pennsylvania interviewing women with mathematical knowledge in 1942 and traveled to attend the interview. After being selected, she worked with Dr. John W. Muchly and his wife Maria. Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (1924-1986), a mathematics graduate from Hunter College, was recruited by Moore School of Engineering to perform ballistic trajectory calculations. She was part of the ENIAC's space area project alongside Marlyn Meltezer. Despite her work within the principles of computing, Ruth did not receive as much credit as her colleagues. However, she was included in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997, where she had already passed away, and her husband accepted the award on her behalf. Frances Bilas Spence (1922-2012), a teacher who studied mathematics at Temple University, obtained a Chestnut Hill College scholarship, where she met Kathleen. They later shared destiny working together on the ENIAC. She soon resigned to dedicate herself to her family.