First woman to design computer dies at 86

PanARMENIAN.Net - Betty Jean Bartik, one of the first women in the IT industry, has passed away at the age of 86. Bartik was on the team that programmed and de-bugged the first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

She was one of the female mathematicians, known as "computers," recruited by the United States military during World War II to test ballistics. They soon moved into the electronics program, ReadWriteWeb reported

Jennings Bartik was born in December of 1924. After high school, she attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, where she was the only female Math major at the time. Now that college has a computer museum named in her honor.

Jennings Bartik was brought into the ENIAC project in the fall of 1945. The computer came on line in February of 1946, having cost $6 million in today's currency. It weighed 27 tons and contained almost 18,000 vacuum tubes.