Like a museum exhibit, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s resident supercomputer is proudly displayed inside a giant glass case. It sits inside Dierks Hall at the heart of campus, where prospective students parade by during tours. And while far from a historical artifact, the supercomputer pays homage to the past in a way that many Milwaukeeans might not realize.
Emblazoned on the supercomputer is its name, Rosie, which nods to six women mathematicians who changed computing history. Their story starts in the 1940s, when women entered the workforce at record rates to fill jobs once held by men who left to fight in World War II.
Experience an unforgettable evening celebrating great design!
Famously, women workers of the time were known as Rosies; think Rosie the Riveter, the cultural icon who represented female factory workers. But job openings during the war went beyond manual labor. The Army needed brains to compute ballistics trajectories as Allied troops fought the Axis powers on land, in the air and at sea.
Back then, computers were not devices – they were people. Scores of women crunched numbers on papers with mechanical calculators for long hours every day to help soldiers win on the battlefield. Six of them – Jean Bartik, Kay McNulty, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum – were later selected to work on an Army project that was kept under wraps until the war ended.
The top-secret project, tucked away in a basement on the University of Pennsylvania campus, would change the world forever. It was called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC for short, and is widely known as the first general-purpose electronic computer.
Imagine yourself standing in a room full of switches, dials, cords, and blinking lights that stretch from floor to ceiling. That was the ENIAC, a behemoth of a machine that paved the way for every type of computer we use today. But such a legacy would be impossible without the pivotal work of the six mathematicians who programmed it.
“Computing history has often talked about the individuals who lead, and they get recognition and awards and that sort of thing,” says Derek Riley, MSOE’s computer science program director. “But the reality is there are teams behind them.”
Many accounts of the ENIAC are quick to enshrine the contributions of the machine’s engineers, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. While the two designed the ENIAC, they did not program it; instead, it was the six women who were left to their own devices to figure out how to make the computer solve problems.
Riley says the decision to name the MSOE supercomputer after these influential programmers arose from discussions with alumnus Dwight Diercks, who gifted the funds to build the Rosie and the hall it’s housed in. “I think [the name] is perfect,” Riley says.
In the spirit of ENIAC, Rosie processes heaps of data using cutting-edge technology. It relies on artificial intelligence, giving students an opportunity to work with tools that are ushering in a new age of computing.
But Riley says the name Rosie also emphasizes the importance of diversity in the fields of computing and engineering, which have historically been male-dominated. While the majority of MSOE’s undergraduate students – 72% – are male, the graduate student gender gap is close to parity.
“There’s a clear technical tie” between ENIAC and Rosie, he says. “I also think it does sort of earmark or indicate a trajectory change” for the field.
