ClassyJudy
When most people hear the word “computer science,” they think of famous men: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing. But the story of computing is not only about men. In fact, some of the biggest breakthroughs were made by women, and many of them have been quietly erased from the spotlight.
- The First Programmer Wasn’t a Man
The first person to ever write code was Ada Lovelace, in the 1800s. She imagined that numbers could do more than just math, they could make machines create music, art, and logic.
Today, we call her the first programmer, but in her own time, she was seen as just a mathematician’s assistant. Her vision of computers went far beyond what even Charles Babbage, the “father of the computer,” believed.
Without Ada, maybe we would never have thought of computers as more than calculators.
- The Women Behind World War II Computers
During World War II, when soldiers were fighting on the battlefield, a different kind of battle was happening in secret rooms. A group of women, later nicknamed the ENIAC girls, were programming one of the first electronic computers.
They weren’t given manuals. They had to figure out how to make a giant machine of wires and switches solve problems for the army. These women, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, and others were pioneers of programming.
But when the ENIAC computer was revealed to the public in 1946, the men who built the hardware were praised on stage. The women were asked to step aside, almost invisible in photographs. History nearly forgot them.
- The Woman Who Made Computers Speak Human
Grace Hopper was another giant in computer science. She invented the idea of programming languages that use words instead of only numbers. Without her, we might still be writing programs in long chains of unreadable code.
She even coined the term “debugging” after finding a moth stuck in a computer circuit. But more than that, she believed that computers should be tools for ordinary people, not just scientists.
Today, millions of programmers use languages influenced by her work, but many don’t even know her name.
Why Were They Forgotten? Why did these women disappear from history books?
Believe it or not, in the early days, computing was seen as “women’s work,” like typing or filing but when computers became powerful and profitable, the field suddenly became “men’s work.”
The story was rewritten, and the women were left out.
But evven if their names are not always remembered, their fingerprints are everywhere:
- Every time you code in a modern language, you use Grace Hopper’s dream.
- Every time you run a program, you rely on the logic Ada Lovelace imagined.
- Every time a computer solves a problem, it follows the path first set by the women of ENIAC.
These women may not have statues or tech empires named after them, but they gave us something bigger: the foundation of computer science itself.
Remembering these women is not just about giving credit. It’s about telling the full story of technology. It’s about inspiring new generations of girls to see computers not as machines for others, but as tools they can shape.
The future of computing belongs to everyone and that’s the lesson these women leave behind.
ClassyJudy
