Her input helped bring dawn of computer age

Jean Jennings Bartik, 86, formerly of Collingswood, one of six women who programmed the first computer, died of heart failure Wednesday, March 23, at the Pines at Poughkeepsie nursing home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

In 1945, Mrs. Bartik was working in an Army ballistics research lab at the University of Pennsylvania when she learned about an opportunity to be a programmer for the first electronic computer, ENIAC. She and five other women were hired to break down complicated equations with the help of the 100-foot-long, 10-foot-high machine, housed in a basement at Penn, and in 1946 she coprogrammed a test problem for ENIAC's first public demonstration.

In the late 1940s, Mrs. Bartik joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in Philadelphia. The firm was founded by ENIAC's inventors, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who also developed UNIVAC, the first successful commercial computer.

"Eckert and Mauchly were not only brilliant, but wonderful human beings," Mrs. Bartik wrote in a letter to The Inquirer in 1999. "It was fun to race along with them as they discussed their ideas. They were great talkers, and what I learned from working with them was that no question is too small to ask of a true genius."

At the dedication of a UNIVAC historic marker in Philadelphia in 2006, Mrs. Bartik told an Inquirer reporter that working with Eckert and Mauchly had been "technical Camelot."

"They believed we could do anything," she said, "and we believed we could do it ourselves."

Mrs. Bartik's contributions to computer science have been recognized in recent years. In 2002, her alma mater, Northwest Missouri State University, dedicated the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum, and she delivered the school's 2002 commencement address.

In 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in Los Angeles. She was named a fellow of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and received the Computer Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She also appeared in the recent documentary Top Secret Rosies about female "computers," as the programmers were called.

Born Betty Jean Jennings, Mrs. Bartik and her six siblings grew up on a farm near Stanberry, Mo. In 1944, she earned a bachelor's degree from what was then Northwest Missouri State Teacher's College.

She married William Bartik, an electrical engineer, in 1946. She stayed home to raise her family in Jenkintown and Elkins Park from 1951 to 1967.

After she and her husband divorced, she worked for Auerbach Publishers and for several computer firms, including Data Decisions in Cherry Hill. Then, for more than a decade until she was in her 70s, she was a Realtor in Collingswood.

She moved to Poughkeepsie in September to be close to family.

In her last years, Mrs. Bartik enjoyed speaking about her early work with computers, especially to young women, encouraging them to enter and reach the top of scientific and technical occupations, said her son, Timothy.

Her memoir is in the process of being published.

In addition to her son, Mrs. Bartik is survived by daughters Mary Williams and Jane, five grandchildren, one-great-grandson, and her former husband.

A memorial service will be held Sunday, June 5, at the Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum in Maryville, Mo.