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Ask someone to name the pioneers of computing, and you’ll likely hear the same handful of names: Turing. Gates. Jobs. It’s a reliable list, and it is spectacularly incomplete. Because long before Silicon Valley existed, before “programmer” was a job title anyone coveted, before computers were even made of silicon — women were doing the work. Not assisting with it. Not observing it. Doing it.
This isn’t a footnote to the history of technology. It is the history of technology, just told from the wrong end.
Ada Lovelace was twenty-seven years old in 1843 when she wrote what many historians now recognize as the world’s first computer program. She was working alongside Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine — a mechanical computing machine that, had it ever been built, would have been a century ahead of its time. Babbage understood what the machine could do. Lovelace understood what it meant.
While he saw a sophisticated calculator, she saw something closer to what we would today call a general-purpose computer — a machine capable not just of crunching numbers, but of processing any information that could be expressed in logical form. Music, language, symbols. Anything. She wrote that insight down alongside a complete algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers, and in doing so produced what is widely regarded as the first example of a computer program.
The “first programmer” title is not entirely without controversy. Some historians, including the computer scientist Allan Bromley, have argued that Lovelace’s notes contain mathematical errors, and that Babbage himself may have contributed more to the technical content than is typically acknowledged. These debates are genuine and worth taking seriously. What is not seriously in dispute is that Lovelace grasped the conceptual possibilities of computing with a clarity and ambition that nobody else of her era came close to matching. She died at thirty-six. The Analytical Engine was never built in her lifetime. The world spent the next hundred years catching up to conclusions she had already written down.
By the time World War II arrived, “computer” was a job title — and it belonged almost exclusively to women. The military needed vast quantities of mathematical calculations performed quickly and accurately: ballistic trajectories, weapons ranges, engineering tolerances. The solution was to hire hundreds of women with strong mathematics backgrounds and put them to work with mechanical calculators and paper worksheets. The pay was modest. The work was indispensable. The irony was apparently lost on everyone in a position to notice it.
When the first large-scale electronic computers began to appear, these same women made the transition from calculating by hand to programming machines that had never existed before — with no documentation, no training programs, and no predecessors to learn from. They worked it out themselves.
Six of them — Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman — were assigned to program ENIAC, one of the world’s first large-scale
electronic computers, in 1945. They physically mapped the machine’s architecture, crawled behind its panels to trace its wiring, diagnosed its faults, and developed programming techniques that became foundational to the entire field. When journalists came to photograph the machine, the women were sometimes absent from the frame entirely. In photos where they did appear, they were frequently assumed to be models or clerical staff posing beside equipment they had no hand in building.
When historian Kathy Kleiman began researching ENIAC in the 1980s, she initially struggled to find out who the women in the photographs actually were. Their names had simply not been recorded in the standard documentation. It took years of archival research and interviews to recover them. Some of the women had already died before anyone thought to ask.
It would be too simple to call this a deliberate conspiracy of erasure. Early computing history was poorly documented across the board, and many contributors — men included — slipped out of the record. But the pattern of whose contributions got noted and whose got overlooked was not random. It followed the existing architecture of who was considered worth documenting, and in the 1940s, that architecture was not built with women in mind.
Grace Hopper looked at machine code — the binary instructions that early computers required — and concluded it was an unnecessary obstacle between human beings and useful computation. In 1952, she developed one of the first compilers: a program capable of translating instructions written in something closer to plain language into the machine code a computer could actually execute. The achievement was real and significant. It helped open programming to a far wider range of people and pointed directly toward the high-level programming languages that define software development today.
A popular version of this story includes colleagues dismissing the idea as impossible before Hopper proved them wrong. The anecdote is widely repeated, and it may be true — resistance to unconventional ideas in technical fields was hardly rare. But the specific claim is difficult to verify and has likely been sharpened in the retelling, as good stories tend to be. What the historical record establishes clearly is the work itself: Hopper built the compiler, it worked, and computing changed because of it.
She went on to play a central role in developing COBOL — Common Business Oriented Language — a programming language designed for business applications that is still actively in use today, processing transactions in banking systems, managing government databases, and running infrastructure that most people interact with daily without knowing it. The next time you use an ATM, there is a reasonable chance the system handling your transaction traces its lineage back to work Grace Hopper did seventy years ago.
Margaret Hamilton came to NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s as a software engineer at a time when software engineering was not yet a recognized discipline. She led the team at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory that developed the onboard flight software for the Apollo missions, and she argued — persistently, and against considerable institutional resistance — that software development deserved the same rigor, the same systematic methodology, and the same professional respect as hardware engineering.
Hamilton is frequently credited with coining the term “software engineering” to make precisely this point. The attribution is widespread and she has confirmed it in interviews. Some historians note that the term was circulating in the computing community around the same period, making the precise origin difficult to pin down with certainty. What is clear is that Hamilton was among the most prominent voices insisting that software was engineering, that it required discipline and formal methods, and that in a context like Apollo — where the software was guiding human beings to the surface of the Moon — getting it wrong was not an option.
During the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, the onboard computer began generating error alarms with the lunar module three minutes from the surface. The computer was being asked to process more data than it could handle. Because Hamilton’s team had designed the software with explicit priority scheduling — a system that could recognize which tasks were critical and set others aside — the computer kept processing what mattered and discarded what didn’t. The landing continued. Armstrong touched down.
The specific design decisions that made this possible were the product of a team, not a single person, and Hamilton has been careful to acknowledge her colleagues’ contributions. But the philosophy behind those decisions — the insistence on anticipating failure, on building systems robust enough to handle the unexpected — was one she championed. The software worked because someone had thought carefully, years earlier, about what to do when everything went wrong simultaneously.
After the Apollo software was written, it had to be encoded into the computer’s rope memory — a physical medium in which data was literally woven into place using copper wire threaded through or around tiny magnetic cores. The pattern of the threading represented the ones and zeros of the program. It was painstaking, precise work that could not be rushed or approximated, and it required a level of skilled manual dexterity that not everyone possessed.
Some accounts of this process have described the work as being performed by Navajo women, connecting their expertise in traditional weaving to their selection for this role. It is a resonant and appealing story, and versions of it have appeared in a number of popular histories of the space program. However, the historical documentation for this specific claim is thin, and the connection between weaving expertise and rope memory assembly — while intuitively plausible — has not been rigorously established in the scholarly record. What is documented is that the rope memory weaving was performed by skilled workers at Raytheon, the company contracted to produce the hardware; the specific demographics and backgrounds of those workers are less thoroughly recorded.
The story illustrates a broader problem in recovering this history: the most dramatic and meaningful versions of events are not always the best-documented ones, and the pressure to find a perfect narrative arc — women’s traditional craft skills repurposed to carry humans to the Moon — can sometimes run ahead of what the evidence actually supports. The truth, which is that essential and highly skilled work was performed by people who never received adequate credit for it, is compelling enough without embellishment.
The history of computing contains a recurring structure: women doing work that was critical, foundational, and genuinely brilliant, followed by credit migrating elsewhere, or disappearing entirely. It would be satisfying to attribute this to a single cause — deliberate suppression, institutional sexism operating as a coherent policy — but the reality is more diffuse and in some ways more dispiriting. It was the accumulated effect of a thousand smaller assumptions: that the person worth photographing was the man standing next to the machine, that the work worth documenting was the hardware rather than the programming, that “computer” when used as a job title was a clerical role rather than a technical one.
Those assumptions were not neutral. They reflected a world in which women’s intellectual contributions were routinely undervalued, and they produced a historical record with systematic gaps where women’s work should be. Recovering that record — as historians, archivists, and researchers have been doing with increasing rigor over the past few decades — means being precise about what we actually know, honest about what remains uncertain, and resistant to the temptation to resolve every gap with a story that fits too neatly.
The women who built the foundations of modern computing deserve accurate history, not just heroic mythology. As it happens, the accurate history is remarkable enough.