Proving Ground by Kathy Kleiman

Author:Kathy Kleiman [Kleiman, Kathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Now with the Los Alamos scientists, the restricted ENIAC room had further secrets. Because no one could see their data, Stan and Nick brought already-punched cards from Los Alamos—about a million of them.13 Then the six women helped them run the punched cards on their classified “test” program. They were surprised by the high level of responsibility they were given.

Kay and Fran generally worked on the day shifts with Nick, and Betty and Jean generally worked nights with Stan. Marlyn and Ruth helped on both shifts as needed. Throughout the process, Pres and John were constant presences in the room, “like mother hens” to the ENIAC still in testing mode. Kay remembers, “They stayed with that computer night and day, and whatever went wrong, they went in there” to fix it.14

Pres tended to work days and John generally took night shift, but the work never fell into regular shifts and days regularly rolled into nights. “Many a night Eckert and I ran the full six blocks to the 30th Street station,” Kay recalled, “and then collapsed into a sound sleep on the last train out to the suburbs.”15

The program generated punched cards that the women then ran through the tabulators to print them out. Nick and Stan made sure to keep the accordion-paper printouts with the results of their calculations securely locked up, first in their locked briefcase and then in a safe.16 One day, Nick left the briefcase at a nearby drugstore when he and Pres stopped there. When they realized their mistake, the two ran back at breakneck speed and breathed a sigh of relief when the clerk handed the briefcase back to them. “If it had had something of value in it,” he quipped, “you guys would have lost it.”17 No secret was more closely held at the time and many of the documents remain top secret today. The ENIAC team, women and men, would not know for years the nature of the equations they had calculated.

After a few weeks of dedication to the Los Alamos project, it was decided that Kay and Fran would stay with Nick and Stan to continue the Los Alamos work. They got to know the two men pretty well, and Kay would keep in touch with them for years to come.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.