I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which is worth reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Compute...

It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".

The work in the late 40s was interesting, too. First, you had specialized systems, then Eckert, Mauchly, and von Neumann started working on stored program computers. They had to figure out what opcodes were needed and how they were going to be implemented. Jean Jennings Bartik's book (http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-C...) is a great first-hand account of all the work (and drama) from back then.

(Not trying to short-change Bartik here either -- she did a lot of the work on the ENIAC instruction set when they converted it to a stored-program computer)