As we celebrate Mother's Day, and all that the holiday embodies,
I thought of all the mothers and women who have gone before us,
paving the way in many arenas. One group in particular caught my
eye this week. Fifty years after they programmed The ENIAC, the
world's first computer, the world's first programmers are
receiving long-overdue recognition for their work. Six women
will receive the Hall of Fame award from the Women in Technology
International Assn. The ENIAC was invented to calculate
ballistics trajectories during W.W.II. Prior to this, the task
had been done by hand by a group of mathematicians, eighty
females. The six women who made the ENIAC work toiled six-day
weeks, inventing the field of programming as they worked. But
although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the
women were classified as "sub-professionals" and never got the
credit due to them. Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of
WITI, said "Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time,
a typical problem in a male-do