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Jean attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, majoring in mathematics. She became one of only six women computer programmers on the ENIAC, the world's first successful electronic computer.
Northwest unveiled its Electronic Campus Program in 1987. The program, brainchild of Dr. Jon Rickman, was designed to enhance leaning and instruction by placing computing equipment in every residence hall room and faculty/staff office.
Jean Jennings Bartik, whom the collection is named after, was born "Betty Jean" Jennings outside Stanberry, Missouri. Jean, who stopped using "Betty" in the mid-to-late 1950s for business reasons, graduated from Northwest in 1945 and went on to make history by becoming one of the world's first computer programmers.
Jean graduated from Northwest in 1945 and was hired as "Human Computer" during World War II. She was literally a "Top Secret Rosie." Jean calculated firing trajectories for the United States military so they could accurately aim at and fire their big guns and hit their intended targets. Jean then went on to program the ENIAC (The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the world's first successful electronic "general purpose, programmable" computer during World War II. Jean also led a team that turned the ENIAC into the world's first successful stored program computer by March 1948.
Besides her work on the ENIAC, Jean helped to launch the commercial computer industry by programming the BINAC and designing and programming the UNIVAC I. Jean wrote the world's first sort/merge program for a computer (UNIVAC I). The UNIVAC, which was also the first computer to have a mass storage system (Magnetic Tape), was the first successful commercial computer. The first UNIVAC was sold to the United States Census Bureau.
The UNIVAC was a marvelous computer for the time and would be the first computer to predict a presidential election before the polls closed for CBS news. The UNIVAC predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would win the 1952 presidential election by a landslide, and the UNIVAC was correct! Almost overnight the UNIVAC became a cultural icon appearing on the cover of a Superman comic book and appearing in a cartoon featuring Wile E. Coyote and Bugs Bunny called "To Hare is Human."
