A new story by John Markoff posted as a blog to the Computer History Museum's website. I did not find anything about this in the Thomas Haigh, *et al.* book *ENIAC in Action* book. Brian Berg “Unprogramming” the ENIAC: Lehmer Child’s Play <http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/unprogramming-the-eniac-lehmer-childs-play/> At the dawn of the modern computing era teenager Laura Gould and her brother Donald Lehmer were the youngest “un-programmers.” That is because ENIAC, one of the world’s first general-purpose computers, was programmed with an array of switches and cables. When each program had been run, someone had to return the cables to their proper storage box to be available for the next program. Shortly after the installation of the ENIAC their parents, Derrick Henry Lehmer and Emma Trotskaya Lehmer, who were well-known number theorists at the University of California at Berkeley, were invited to use the machine for mathematical research. Designed to aid the war effort and completed in 1945 at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was a pioneering electronic digital computer. However, it was not a stored-program computer in the modern sense of the term. Historian David Alan Grier described it as more like an array of electronic adding machines and arithmetic units that were held together by a web of large electrical cables. The machine itself, which was about one thousand times faster than the electro-mechanical calculators of that time, occupied a large room and was evocative of a telephone switchboard of the era, with a plugboard array that could be rewired with cables of different lengths. That’s where Gould and her brother came in. As youngsters they would accompany their parents on cross-country car trips to gather valuable research time on the machine. The ENIAC would be programmed with plugboard-style cables that were operated in the manner of a mechanical telephone switchboard. While traveling with their parents, a babysitter wasn’t always available, and so the two children who were then in their early teens, would accompany their parents for the long programming sessions that often stretched into the evening. After the programs ran, their job was to aid in resetting the computer by laboriously disconnected all of the cables and placing them in boxes according to length. “It was our job to strike when the program was over and put all of the cables in their appropriate boxes sorted by lengths,” she recalled. Neither brother nor sister remember precisely what programs their parents were developing. It is possible that they were exploring different methods for predicting the next prime number, but it is also conceivable that they were involved in some aspect of classified military research. The ENIAC had been commissioned to help the United States Army calculate artillery trajectories. However, Donald Lehmer noted that his father was a pacifist: “He had no interest in doing anything that would kill people. I suspect he was thinking about prime numbers.” [snip]
