Short answers, pulled from the story.
A press conference held on the 1st of February 1946 announced the completed machine to the public. Elizabeth Snyder and Betty Jean Jennings developed the demonstration trajectory program that calculated missile paths in 15 seconds.
Herman Goldstine selected Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman as the primary operators. These women studied blueprints and physical structures to manipulate switches and cables since no programming languages existed yet.
A landmark federal court case Honeywell Inc v Sperry Rand Corp voided this decision in 1973. The ruling stated that ENIAC inventors derived subject matter from Atanasoff's work and gave legal recognition to Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.
The original contract amount was $61,700 but the final cost reached almost $500,000. This discrepancy arose during construction which began secretly under the code name Project PX in July 1943.
It operated continuously until 11:45 p.m. on the 2nd of October 1955 when retired in favor of EDVAC and ORDVAC computers. The machine remained in continuous operation at Aberdeen until its retirement date in late 1955.