From Wikipedia, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...:
> ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S.[16] The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Frank Mural (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis (accumulators).[17] In 1946, the researchers resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
> ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators that could not only add and subtract, but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across several general-purpose buses (or trays, as they were called). In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer and trigger the next operation, all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations, depending on the sign of a computed result.
Are you really telling me that the people that made the machine had no idea how to programme it, not even a system in place to enable that? The OP makes it sounds like the makers just randomly built stuff and it took women (not computer scientists, or mathematicians; but women, if they'd had testicles they'd have been unable ...) to come along, decipher the randomly wired together hardware, realise it could be used as a computer, and then develop programming -- independent of any men mind you, men didn't even sweep the floors.
This whole retconning of past scientific and engineering efforts as solely performed by women is silly.