Jeremy Keeshin
@jkeesh
In 1945, six women pulled off a computing miracle.

They programmed the world’s first computer—with no manuals, no training.

Then, a SINGLE assumption erased them from tech history for decades.

The story of how ONE photo nearly deleted computing’s female founders: 🧵

Kathy Kleiman, a young programmer, found old photos of women standing beside ENIAC—the first general-purpose computer.

When she asked who they were, curators said: “Probably just models”...

But Kleiman had a feeling they were something more:

Program ENIAC—a machine the world had never seen.

It was 8 feet tall, 80 feet long, and weighed over 60,000 pounds.

The engineers built the hardware...

But someone had to figure out how to make it do anything:

They were the world’s first programmers.

First, they were hired as “human computers” to calculate missile trajectories during WWII.

Then chosen for a top-secret project unlike anything before:

Security restrictions kept them out of the ENIAC lab.

They had to write programs using only blueprints and logic diagrams.

No manuals. No programming languages...

So how do you code something no one’s ever coded before?

By inventing the process from scratch.

They built algorithms, flowcharts, and step-by-step routines—on paper.

Then, once granted access, they programmed ENIAC by physically rewiring it...

And that’s where things got even harder:

There was no keyboard.

Programming meant plugging thousands of cables into the right configuration—by hand.

It was almost impossible to program.

But they pulled it off anyway: