Jean Bartik

The ENIAC team is also the subject of the 2013 short documentary film The Computers. This documentary, created by Kathy Kleiman and the ENIAC Programmers Project, combines actual footage of the ENIAC team from the 1940s with interviews with the female team members as they reflect on their time working together on the ENIAC. The Computers is the first part of a three-part documentary series, titled Great Unsung Women of Computing: The Computers, The Coders, and The Future Makers.

After her work on ENIAC, Bartik went on to work on BINAC and UNIVAC, and spent time at a variety of technical companies as a writer, manager, engineer and programmer. She spent her later years as a real estate agent and died in 2011 from congestive heart failure complications.

Bartik died from congestive heart failure in a Poughkeepsie, New York nursing home on March 23, 2011. She was 86.

Bartik wrote her autobiography Pioneer Programmer: Jean Jennings Bartik and the Computer that Changed the World prior to her death in 2011 with the help of long-time colleagues, Dr. Jon T. Rickman and Kim D. Todd. The autobiography was published in 2013 by Truman State Press to positive reviews.

In 2010, a documentary Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII was released. The film centered around in-depth interviews of three of the six women programmers, focusing on the commendable patriotic contributions they made during World War II. The ENIAC was responsible for calculating bullet trajectories during the war.

Starting in 1996, once the importance of their role in the development of computing was re-discovered, Bartik along with Betty Holberton and Bartik's other friend of over 60 years Kathleen Antonelli (ENIAC programmer and wife of ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly) began to finally receive the acknowledgement and honors for their pioneering work in the early field of computing. Bartik and Antonelli became invited speakers both at home and abroad to share their experiences working with the ENIAC, BINAC and UNIVAC. Bartik especially went on to receive many honors and awards for her pioneering role programming the ENIAC, BINAC and UNIVAC, the latter of which helped to launch the commercial computer industry, and for turning the ENIAC into the world's first stored program computer.

After getting her master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and making the decision to divorce her husband, Bartik joined the Auerbach Corporation writing and editing technical reports on minicomputers. Bartik remained with Auerbach for eight years, then moved among positions with a variety of other companies for the rest of her career as a manager, writer, and engineer. Jean Bartik and William Bartik divorced by 1968. Bartik ultimately retired from the computing industry in 1986 when her final employer, Data Decisions (a publication of Ziff-Davis), was sold; Bartik spent the following 25 years as a real estate agent.

After the end of the war, Bartik went on to work with the ENIAC designers John Eckert and John Mauchly, and helped them develop the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers. BINAC was the first computer to use magnetic tape instead of punch cards to store data and the first computer to utilize the twin unit concept. BINAC was purchased by Northrop Aircraft to guide the Snark missile, but the BINAC proved to be too large for their purposes. However, according to a Northrop Aircraft programmer, claims that the BINAC did not work once it was moved to Northrop Aircraft were erroneous and the BINAC was working well into the mid-1950s. Besides BINAC, Jean's more important work involved her responsibilities in designing the UNIVAC's logic circuits among other UNIVAC programming and design tasks. Bartik also co-programmed with her life-long friend Betty Holberton the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE) for a computer. Recalling her time working with Eckert and Mauchly on these projects, she described their close group of computer engineers as a "technical Camelot".

In the early 1950s, once the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation was sold to Remington Rand, Bartik went on to help train on how to program and use the UNIVAC for the first six UNIVACs sold, including the programmers at the United States Census Bureau (first UNIVAC sold) and Atomic Energy Commission. Later, Bartik moved to Philadelphia when her husband, William (Bill) Bartik, took a job with Remington Rand. Unfortunately, due to a company policy at the time about husbands and wives working together, Jean was asked to resign from the company. Between 1951 and 1954, prior to her first child's birth, Jean did mostly freelance programming assignments for John Mauchly and was a helpmate to her husband. Once her son was born, Jean walked away from her career in computing to concentrate on raising a family, during which time she had two other children with her husband. It was sometime during this 1950s period that Bartik began going by the name "Jean" rather than her birth first name "Betty", which is what she had been known as during her ENIAC, UNIVAC and Remington-Rand years.

Bartik converted the ENIAC into a stored program computer by March 1948. As head of this process, Bartik was charged with the conversion that allowed the ENIAC to be turned into a rudimentary stored program computer to assist with Clippinger's wind tunnel programs, which allowed the ENIAC to operate more quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

While working there, Bartik met her future husband, William Bartik, who was an engineer working on a Pentagon project at the University of Pennsylvania. They married in December 1946.

In addition to performing the original ballistic trajectories they were hired to compute, the six female programmers soon became operators on the Los Alamos nuclear calculations, and generally expanded the programming repertoire of the machine. Bartik's programming partner on the important trajectory program for the military that would prove that the ENIAC worked to specification was Betty Holberton, known at the time as Betty Snyder. Bartik and Holberton's program was chosen to introduce the ENIAC to the public and larger scientific community. That demonstration occurred on February 15, 1946, and was a tremendous success. The ENIAC proved that it operated faster than the Mark I, a well known electromechanical machine at Harvard, and also showed that the work that would take a "human computer" 40 hours to complete could be done in 20 seconds.

Bartik described the first public demonstration of the ENIAC in 1946:

She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College now known Northwest Missouri State University, majoring in mathematics with a minor in English and graduated in 1945. Jennings was awarded the only mathematics degree in her class. Although she had originally intended to study journalism, she decided to change to mathematics because she had a bad relationship with her adviser. Later in her life, she earned a master's degree in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Northwest Missouri State University in 2002.

In 1945, the United States Army was recruiting mathematicians from universities to aid in the war effort; despite a warning by her adviser that she would be "a cog in a wheel" with the Army, and encouragement to become a mathematics teacher instead, Bartik decided to become a human computer. Bartik's calculus professor encouraged her to take the job at University of Pennsylvania because they had a differential analyzer.

In her childhood, she would ride on horseback to visit her grandmother, who bought the young girl a newspaper to read every day and became a role model for the rest of her life. She began her education at a local one-room school, and gained local attention for her softball skill. In order to attend high school, she lived with her older sister in the neighboring town, where the school was located, and then began to drive every day despite being only 14. She graduated from Stanberry High School in 1941, aged 16.

Jean Bartik (née Betty Jean Jennings; December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC computer.

Born Betty Jean Jennings in Gentry County, Missouri in 1924, she was the sixth of seven children. Her father, William Smith Jennings (1893–1971) was from Alanthus Grove, where he was a schoolteacher as well as a farmer. Her mother, Lula May Spainhower (1887–1988) was from Alanthus. Jennings had three older brothers, William (January 10, 1915) Robert (March 15, 1918); and Raymond (January 23, 1922); two older sisters, Emma (August 11, 1916) and Lulu (August 22, 1919), and one younger sister, Mable (December 15, 1928).