The Other Women of ENIAC: Rethinking IT Innovation - Thomas Haigh

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What makes a computing historian tick? What motivates their research into arcane topics and to lead a group of information technology historians (SIGCIS)? We learn that and more in this enlightening conversation and presentation with Thomas Haigh, author of the very popular book "ENIAC in Action," published in 2016 by MIT Press. Popular stories about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, from Charles Babbage and Alan Turing to Steve Jobs and the World Wide Web. Operations work and the labor of non-geniuses has been mostly written out of the history of innovation, but without it no computer would be useful. Information historian Thomas Haigh has written it back in! This is a talk organized by the IEEE Santa Clara Valley History Committee and co-sponsored by Women in Engineering. It was held Monday March 20, 2017 at the Keypoint Credit Union in Santa Clara.

Thomas Haigh explains that the six women commonly celebrated as the "first computer programmers" were not the only women involved in the ENIAC. In this talk, Haigh explores the forgotten women who actually built the ENIAC.

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