A closer look
Military officials who unveiled the massive ENIAC computer in 1946 completely omitted the brilliant team of six women who actually programmed it from early press photos. While male engineers who merely built the hardware took all the glory, these female pioneers were the ones actually plugging cables and flipping thousands of switches to make the gargantuan machine calculate ballistic trajectories. Tech executives essentially kicked off the modern computing era by actively ignoring the women who wrote the actual software, setting a dismal precedent that Silicon Valley has proudly upheld for over half a century. It took decades for these essential programmers to get their rightful place in the history books, proving that the tech world's most enduring tradition is not innovation, but aggressively taking credit for someone else's tedious invisible labor
