Betty Holberton, ENIAC Programmer
Images (left to right): www.maximumpc.com, www.ieeeghn.org, www.women.cs.cmu.edu
Betty Holberton was born in 1917 in Philadelphia as Frances Elizabeth Snyder. She attended the University of Pennysylvania. On her first day of classes, she was reportedly told by her math professor to quit wasting her time attempting a mathematics degree and to stay home and raise children instead. Holberton went on to study journalism. During the Second World War, when men were away fighting, the U.S. army was hiring women to calculate ballistic trajectories. Betty Snyder was chosen by the Moore School of Engineering to assist with these calculations. Here, a group of about 80 women worked manually calculating ballistic trajectories. These were complex differential calculations. The women who did so were called ‘computors’. In 1945, the Army decided to fund an experimental project: the first all-electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Six of the women ‘computors’ were selected to be its first programmers. Among these six was Betty Holberton.
"Betty had an amazing logical mind, and she solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake" -Jean J. Bartik |
"Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog." -Betty Holberton |
"Betty Holberton was a real software pioneer," -David Knuth, professor emeritus at Stanford University |
She became the Chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin in 1959, helped to develop UNIVAC, wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and the first statistical analysis package for the 1950 U.S. Census. Holberton worked with John Mauchly to develop the C-10 instructions for BINAC (generally considered to be the origins of modern programming languages), and also worked with Grace Hopper in the early standards of COBOL and FORTRAN. Not only did Holberton create commands, but she was also responsible for developing the numeric keypad and for making computers that awful beige color. In 1997, Holberton and the other five original ENIAC programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. Holberton was the only woman of the original six ENIAC programmers to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, also in 1997.
Betty Holberton Inducted Into Women In Technology International Hall of Fame
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