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Kathy Kleiman

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Kathy Kleiman is a leader in Internet law and policy and teaches at American University Washington College of Law in Washington DC. Her passion for finding the truth about the women programming pioneers of ENIAC led her to founding the ENIAC Programmers Project, producing the documentary, The Computers, and writing Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer.

Kathy Kleiman is Senior Policy Fellow with the Program for Information Justice & Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law. She helps manage the Internet as part of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an organization she helped to found.

Author photo, ©Tim Coburn Photography

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Aug. 8, 2022

The Women who Programmed the ENIAC

During World War II, the United States Army contracted with a group of engineers at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering to build the ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer in order to more quickly calculate numbers for ballistics tables. Once the top-secret device was built, someone needed to figure out how to program the more than 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 1,500 mecha...
Guest: Kathy Kleiman