5. ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS
In 1940, the word "computers" referred to people (mostly women) who performed complex calculations by hand. During World War II, the United States began developing new machines to do calculations for ballistics trajectories, and those who had been doing this by hand took jobs programming these new machines.
The programmers who worked on the University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC machine included Jean Jennings Bartik, who went on to lead the development of computer storage and memory. Also, Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton, who went on to create the first software application.
Lieutenant Grace Hopper (later a Navy rear admiral) also programmed the Mark 1 machine at Harvard University during the war and went on to develop the first computer programming language.
In Britain, Alan Turing invented an electro-mechanical machine called the Bombe that helped break the German Enigma cipher. While not technically what today we would call a computer, the Bombe was the forerunner to the Colossus machines, a series of British electronic computers.
During the war, programmers like Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker used the Colossus machines to break messages encrypted with the German Lorenz cipher.
--Cooter
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