Bartik enshrined in premier computing hall of fame

bartik med

Northwest alumna Jean Jennings Bartik, right, talks with Linus Torvalds, who played
a key role in developing the Linux operating system, following their installation as
Computer History Museum Fellows during a gala at the museum's campus in Mountain
View, Calif. Bartik was one of a team of young women who programmed the world's first
electronic computer, ENIAC, during World War II.

Computing pioneer and Northwest alumna Jean Jennings Bartik was honored Oct. 21 during a black-tie gala at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Considered the premier repository of computing history in the world, the museum presented Bartik with its Fellow Award, meaning she will be enshrined in the CHM Hall of Fellows, sometimes described as “the Cooperstown of Computing.”

The day after her installation, Bartik returned to the museum for a live interview with Northern California Broadcasting’s Linda O’Bryon before an audience consisting of some of the computing profession’s most distinguished scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.

Bartik, who was raised on a farm near Stanberry, earned a mathematics degree from Northwest in 1945 and was one of six young women hired by the U.S. Army to serve as "computers" (known today as programmers). The group was assigned to program ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer, which was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md.

Conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC was a hailed as an international scientific breakthrough and heralded in the press as a "giant brain" capable of computational speeds up to a thousand times faster than the electro-mechanical devices that preceded it.

Dr. Jon Rickman, Northwest’s vice president for information systems, attended the gala with Bartik, as did Bill Mauchly, the son of John Mauchly.

Bartik’s co-honorees included Bob Metcalfe, who led the effort to develop and standardize Ethernet, the networking system that essentially makes the Internet possible, and Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux Kernel and oversaw the open-source development of the widely used Linux operating system.

As Computer History Museum Fellows, Bartik, Metcalfe and Torvalds join such preeminent computing figures as Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen, Apple’s Steve Wozniak, programming language pioneer Grace Murray Hopper and Tim Berners-Lee, who made seminal contributions to the development of the World Wide Web.

“Jean Jennings Bartik symbolizes the real dedication of a team of women who were really breaking ground in a brand-new technology that has changed the world as much as any technology ever has,” Rickman said. “She broke through many barriers in the performance of scientific tasks that were really part a man’s world, and she did it while making several major contributions to computing and exhibiting the highest levels of persistence, hard work and excellence.”

After her initial contributions during and immediately after World War II, Bartik became part of a group charged with converting the ENIAC into a stored program computer, a milestone that reduced problem set-up times from weeks to hours. She also played important roles in the development of ENIAC’s successors, BINAC and UNIVAC I.

Later in her career, Bartik became an editor for Auerbach Publishers, an early publisher in high tech sector. In 1981, she joined Data Decisions as a senior editor for communications services.

Featured last year in an ABC News report (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=3951187&page=1), she has been inducted, along with the other ENIAC programmers, into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and honored by the Army Research Labs and the University of Pennsylvania.

Northwest’s Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum, housed in the B.D. Owens Library is named in her honor, and she received an honorary doctorate from the University in 2002.

For more information, please contact:

Anthony Brown,
News Bureau Manager
E-Mail: abrown@nwmissouri.edu
Phone: 660.562.1704
Fax: 660.562.1900

Northwest Missouri State University
219 Administration Building,
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

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