Proving Ground The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer

After the end of World War II, top-secret research continued across the United States, as scientists, mathematicians and programmers alike rushed to complete their confidential assignments before time ran out. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first digital computer — a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in ten seconds rather than 40 hours by human hand — even though there was no manual or coding language in existence. They battled against not only this difficult task, but also the men who sought to steal credit away from them. Sadly, their misogynistic efforts were successful, and these women were lost to history.

Kathy Kleiman, through meticulous research and vivid prose, brings these women back to life, and back into the historical record. For more than two decades, she pored over hours of broadcast-quality film, documentation, and images that had been relegated and dismissed by even computer history “experts,” who had assumed the women pictured were nothing more than models. PROVING GROUND is a character-driven narrative that restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC programmers' groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before.

Kathy Kleiman is a global leader in Internet law and policy and is currently a visiting scholar at Princeton. Her passion for finding the truth behind these female programmers led to her founding the Eniac Programmers Project, which completed a 20-minute documentary on the subject of this book titled "The Computers: The Remarkable Story of ENIAC Programmers." The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2014 and won Grand Jury Prize Best Documentary Short at the United Nations Film Festival in 2016.