In 1945, six women programmed the world’s first computer—without manuals, formal training, or recognition. Their names—Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence—were nearly lost to history. When a young computer scientist named Kathy Kleiman stumbled upon a photo of them beside the towering ENIAC machine decades later, she was told dismissively, “They’re probably just models.” But they weren’t. They were the world’s first true coders. Originally hired during WWII as “human computers,” the women were tasked with programming ENIAC from scratch—working from blueprints alone, since they weren’t allowed in the lab. They invented the first algorithms, flowcharts, and logic systems on paper, before manually programming the machine by plugging in cables, switch by switch. On February 14, 1946, ENIAC debuted to global astonishment. But while the male hardware engineers were celebrated, the women behind the programming were left out of the headlines. Society didn’t yet see coding as “real work.” As computing evolved, so did the myth of the male coder, and the women who had laid the foundation were erased from textbooks. But they continued shaping tech—Holberton wrote the first software application, Bartik advanced memory systems, McNulty helped invent subroutines, all core to modern programming. Their legacy was nearly lost—until Kleiman tracked them down in the 1980s and brought their story back into the light. In 1997, they were finally honored, many in their seventies. But by then, tech culture had already shifted, claiming innovation as a boys’ domain. We can’t undo that erasure—but we can rewrite the narrative going forward. Because women didn’t just enter tech—they built it. And the legacy of the first programmers belongs to all of us.
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