ENIAC programmers
Six women were handed a machine with no manual and invented the job of programmer on the way.
Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman were drawn from the Moore School's pool of computers — at the time a job title for people who worked out artillery firing tables by hand. In 1945 they were told to make ENIAC do the same thing. There were no programming languages, no documentation and at first no access to the machine at all: they learned it from wiring diagrams and logic drawings.
For the public demonstration on 14 February 1946 the trajectory came out right, in under a second. The engineers who built the machine were named in the press; the women at the cables were long assumed to be models hired for the photographs, and were not invited to the celebratory dinner. Snyder — later Holberton — wrote the sort-merge generator for UNIVAC and sat on the standards work behind COBOL; Jennings, later Bartik, led ENIAC's conversion to stored-program operation. Recognition arrived in the 1990s, after Kathryn Kleiman's archival work.