Speaker 2
We said it was a little bit like the telephone operators with cables in order to make this thing work. And those operations were all done by women. There was the group called the ENIAC-6, these women who knew the computer intimately, and then do all this work with these cables. I suppose considered a menial work, and of course we have to rethink that. That's exactly right. And in fact, this is a historian Thomas Hake,
Speaker 1
who's mentioned in my book quite a lot as well, and he finds that not only were women involved in the programming side of things as in the plug, figuring out how to make a new program go, they were also involved in the engineering side from early on. So they actually built the machine, and of course the male engineers were seen in the project, and they were designing the machine and so on, but it was actually women that ended up building the machine as well as then programming
Speaker 2
it. So what did Clary do? I suppose what was John von Neumann had a particular interest in this, he could see the potential of this, and actually I think tried to redesign the ENIAC computer for his own uses to make it more programmable, to improve its memory and that kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1
so the war's over and von Neumann bumps into Goldstein, Goldstein says, oh, you've got to come and take a look, and immediately von Neumann sort of involves himself in the project. Now, the ENIAC was the brainchild of Press for Echats and John Morchley, and Echats this kind of electronics whiz kid who's the son of a local property millionaire, and John Morchley is a physics teacher who's sort of retrained to help the American war efforts, and they also sit around discussing the limitations of the ENIAC, and then von Neumann is sent away to write a report about the next generation computer, which is going to be called the EdFAC.
