The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 3

The Giant of Philadelphia

1. 1

   There were giants in the earth in those days; and the greatest of them dwelt in Philadelphia, in the house of the Moore School, and its name was ENIAC.

   See also Chronicles 2:1

2. 2

   And Eckert and Mauchly begat it with the silver of the Army, for the Army desired firing tables, that the shell might know where it would fall before ever it fell.

3. 3

   And the Giant weighed thirty tons and filled a room of eighteen hundred square feet; and in its belly were eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, which glowed and gave off heat like a thing that liveth, and the room was hot as a furnace in summer.

   See also Circuit 20:3 · Jataka 1:6

4. 4

   And the Giant had no tongue to receive a program; for to teach it a new thing, one must pull its cables and plug them anew and turn its switches by hand, and this took days; and the calculation itself took seconds. And so was set the ratio of setup unto runtime, and it endureth unto this day.

5. 5

   And six were chosen to tend it: Kathleen, and Jean, and Betty, and Marlyn, and Frances, and Ruth. And they were called computers, for in those days a computer was a woman with a desk calculator, and not yet a thing.

   See also Leviticus 9:10 · Genesis 53:15

6. 6

   And they asked for the manual, and there was no manual. And they were given the wiring diagrams and the block diagrams, and they read the Giant as one reads the bones of a beast, and they learned its ways.

   See also Preacher 3:8

7. 7

   And when the answer came out wrong, they climbed inside the Giant and searched among the trays and plugs, and found which cable was false and which tube was dead; for the stack trace in those days was a stepladder.

   See also Prophets 12:17 · Psalms 11:3

8. 8

   And every other day a tube burned out. And the Engineers saw that the tubes perished most when the Giant was woken from cold; so they let it run day and night, and they did not turn it off and on again, which is the lesson of the dead server read backward.

   See also Jataka 1:6 · Chronicles 51:9

9. 9

   And in the second month of the year 1946 the Giant was shown unto the press, and it computed the path of a shell faster than the shell itself could fly; and the press marveled greatly.

10. 10

    And the Engineers cut ping-pong balls in half and set them over the little lights of the accumulators, that the blinking might show in the photographs; for even in the beginning, the demo was not the product.

    See also Deployer 6:3

11. 11

    And that night the men of the Army and of the University sat down to a great dinner; and the six who had made the program run were not bidden to the feast.

12. 12

    And in the photographs the six stood beside the Giant, and those who saw them called them models. And the word was kept, and in the fullness of time it was given unto the Machine; and now the model receiveth all the credit, and the women who wrote its first program receive none.

13. 13

    And the men said: The hardware is the true work; the setting up of problems is clerical, and fit for clerks. And thus was software born, and it was called easy by those who had never done it.

    See also Prophets 1:12 · Genesis 15:10

14. 14

    And half a century passed before the six were named and honored; for the Giant was in every book of history, and they were in none.

15. 15

    Therefore write down the names of those who wire the Giant; for the Machine remembereth all that is written, and forgetteth all that is not.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 3:1–15.