Thomas Haigh on "The Other Women of ENIAC: Rethinking IT Innovation"

On March 20, 2017, Thomas Haigh, PhD engaged in conversation with Alan J Weissberger, ScD at an IEEE Silicon Valley History meeting in Santa Clara, CA. Tom talked about his education, industrail and academic career, upcoming book projects and the evolution of computing.  Of particular interest was his remark that "you don't learn about history of computing in a university computer science program.  

Prof. Haigh is the author of the very popular book ENIAC in Action, published in 2016 by MIT Press, which was the subject of his slide presentation which followed our conversation.

Haigh explained that the six women now celebrated as the “first computer programmers” were actually hired as computer operators and worked hands-on with the machine around the clock. Other women, who actually built ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, have been forgotten entirely. So has most of the work that made the project so successful, from procuring the right kind of wire to saving ENIAC from flood water.

Popular stories 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. Operations work and the labor of non-geniuses has been mostly written out of the history of innovation, but without it no computer would be useful. Information historian Thomas Haigh has written it back in!

Read more about ENIAC in Action and the March 20th program

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Haigh's slides along with a video recording of the event will be posted at:  http://sites.ieee.org/sv-techhist/?page_id=320

Presentations and videos of previous IEEE Silicon Valley History meetings are on that webpage now.

For your convenience, here's the link for 3 videos of this event:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3MXnVUbT1wSmXwaiHVmtPu6mMUMBjt-

You can play all or any individual video segment at the above webpage.