Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age

Books and shows about the history of information technology have usually focused on great inventors and technical breakthroughs, from Charles Babbage and Alan Turing to Steve Jobs and the World Wide Web. Computer operations work has been written out of the story, but without it no computer would be useful. Information historians Thomas Haigh and Mark Priestley are writing it back in. This talk focused on ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, based on research for their book ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, published by MIT Press in January, 2016. They will explain that the women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. Then they will look at business data processing work from the 1950s onward, exploring the growth of operations and facilities work during the mainframe era. Concluding comments will relate this historical material to the human work and physical infrastructure today vanishing from public view into the “cloud.”