Jean Bartik

Her mother, Lula May Spainhower (1887–1988) was from Alanthus.

Her father, William Smith Jennings (1893–1971) was from Alanthus Grove, where he was a schoolteacher as well as a farmer.

Jennings had three older brothers, William (January 10, 1915) Robert (March 15, 1918); and Raymond (January 23, 1922); two older sisters, Emma (August 11, 1916) and Lulu (August 22, 1919), and one younger sister, Mable (December 15, 1928).

In her childhood, she would ride on horseback to visit her grandmother, who bought the young girl a newspaper to read every day and became a role model for the rest of her life.

She began her education at a local one-room school, and gained local attention for her softball skill.

In order to attend high school, she lived with her older sister in the neighboring town, where the school was located, and then began to drive every day despite being only 14.

Jean Bartik ( Betty Jean Jennings; December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the original six programmers of the ENIAC computer.

Bartik studied mathematics in school then began work at the University of Pennsylvania, first manually calculating ballistics trajectories and then using ENIAC to do so.

The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.

Bartik and her colleagues developed and codified many of the fundamentals of programming while working on the ENIAC, since it was the first computer of its kind.

After her work on ENIAC, Bartik went on to work on BINAC and UNIVAC, and spent time at a variety of technical companies as a writer, manager, engineer and programmer.

Born Betty Jean Jennings in Gentry County, Missouri in 1924, she was the sixth of seven children.

She graduated from Stanberry High School in 1941, aged 16.

She was given the title of salutatorian on her graduation.

She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College now known Northwest Missouri State University, majoring in mathematics with a minor in English and graduated in 1945.

Jennings was awarded the only mathematics degree in her class.

Although she had originally intended to study journalism, she decided to change to mathematics because she had a bad relationship with her adviser.

In 1945, the United States Army was recruiting mathematicians from universities to aid in the war effort; despite a warning by her adviser that she would be "a cog in a wheel" with the Army, and encouragement to become a mathematics teacher instead, Bartik decided to become a human computer.

Bartik's calculus professor encouraged her to take the job at University of Pennsylvania because they had a differential analyzer.

She applied to both IBM and the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 20.

Although rejected by IBM, Jennings was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to work for Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground, calculating ballistics trajectories by hand.

While working there, Bartik met her future husband, William Bartik, who was an engineer working on a Pentagon project at the University of Pennsylvania.

They married in December 1946.

When the Electronic Numeric Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was developed for the purpose of calculating the ballistic trajectories human computers like Bartik had been doing by hand, she applied to become a part of the project and was eventually selected to be one of its first programmers.

Bartik was asked to set up problems for the ENIAC without being taught any techniques.

Bartik and five other women (Betty Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff, Kathleen McNulty, Ruth Teitelbaum, and Frances Spence) were chosen to be the main programmers for the ENIAC.

They were known as the "Sensational Six."

Many other women who are often unrecognized contributed to the ENIAC during a period of wartime male labor shortage.

Bartik, who became the co-lead programmer (with Betty Holberton), and the other four original programmers became extremely adept at running the ENIAC; with no manual to rely on, the group reviewed diagrams of the device, interviewed the engineers who had built it, and used this information to teach themselves the skills they needed.

Initially, they were not allowed to see the ENIAC's hardware at all since it was still classified and they had not received security clearance; they had to learn how to program the machine solely through studying schematic diagrams.

The six-woman team was also not initially given space to work together, so they found places to work where they could, in abandoned classrooms and fraternity houses.

While the six women worked on ENIAC, they developed subroutines, nesting, and other fundamental programming techniques, and arguably invented the discipline of programming digital computers.

Bartik and the other ENIAC female programmers learned to physically modify the machine, moving switches and rerouting cables, in order to program it.

In addition to performing the original ballistic trajectories they were hired to compute, the six female programmers soon became operators on the Los Alamos nuclear calculations, and generally expanded the programming repertoire of the machine.

Bartik's programming partner on the important trajectory program for the military that would prove that the ENIAC worked to specification was Betty Holberton, known at the time as Betty Snyder.

Bartik and Holberton's program was chosen to introduce the ENIAC to the public and larger scientific community.

That demonstration occurred on February 15, 1946, and was a tremendous success.

Later in her life, she earned a master's degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Northwest Missouri State University in 2002.

She spent her later years as a real estate agent and died in 2011 from congestive heart failure complications.

Content-management framework Drupal's default theme, Bartik, is named in her honor.