Betty Holberton

Betty Holberton (March 7 1917 – December 8 2001) was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

Early life and education

Betty Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia in 1917. On her first day of classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Betty’s math professor told her that she should stay home raising children instead of wasting her time attempting to achieve a degree in mathematics, and was thus discouraged from pursuing it. Instead, Betty decided to study journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far a-field. Journalism was also one of the few programs of study open to women during that time.

Career

During World War II while the men were fighting for their country, the Army needed the women to compute ballistics trajectories. Betty was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to work as a "computor", and was soon chosen to be one of the six women to program the ENIAC. Classified as "subprofessionals," Betty, along with Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jennings, and Fran Bilas, programmed the ENIAC to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically. Their work on ENIAC earned each of them a place in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. In the beginning, because the ENIAC was classified, the women were only allowed to work with blueprints and wiring diagrams in order to program it. The ENIAC was unveiled on February 15, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania.

After World War II, Betty worked at Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards. She was the Chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin in 1959. She helped to develop the UNIVAC, wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and also the first statistical analysis package which was used for the 1950 US Census. Betty worked with John Mauchly to develop the C-10 instruction for BINAC which is considered to be the prototype of all modern programming languages. She also participated in the development of early standards for the COBOL and Fortran programming languages with Grace Hopper.

Death

She died on December 8 2001 in Rockville, Maryland. [cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title= Frances E. Holberton, 84, Early Computer Programmer |url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E1D7163EF934A25751C1A9679C8B63 |quote=Frances Elizabeth Holberton, one of the first computer programmers, whose contributions to software over the years ranged from an early data-sorting program to helping develop the business programming language Cobol, died on Dec. 8 at a nursing home in Rockville, Md. She was 84. |publisher=New York Times |date=December 17 2001 |accessdate=2008-06-07 ] [cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84 |url=http://www.gcn.com/print/21_1/17702-1.html |quote=Frances “Betty” Snyder Holberton, a pioneer in programming languages and other aspects of computing, died Dec. 8 in Rockville, Md. She was 84. |publisher=Government Computer News |date=January 7 2002 |accessdate=2008-06-07 ]

Legacy

In 1997 she was the only woman of the original six who programmed the ENIAC to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, one of the highest honors possible for a computer programmer.

Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers

Trivia

It is from her suggestion that grey, rather than black, was chosen as the colour for UNIVAC computers, atypical to others at the time.Fact|date=June 2008

External links

* [http://www.awc-hq.org/livewire/199705.html Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton] at the Association for Women in Computing website
* [http://www.gcn.com/print/21_1/17702-1.html Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84]
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=22 Two oral history interviews with Frances E. Holberton] . Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. UNIVAC Conference (17-18 May 1990) as well as interview by James Baker Ross (14 April 1983). In the latter, Holberton discusses her education from 1940 through the 1960s and her experiences in the computing field. These include work with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, David Taylor Model Basin, and the National Bureau of Standards. She discusses her perceptions of cooperation and competition between members of these organizations and the difficulties she encountered as a woman. She recounts her work on ENIAC and LARC, her design of operating systems, and her applications programming.
* [http://special.lib.umn.edu/findaid/xml/cbi00094.xml Frances E. Holberton Papers, circa 1950s-1980s] . Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

References

Further reading

* cite book
last = Stanley
first = Autumn
title = Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology
publisher = The Scarecrow Press Inc.
date = 1933
chapter = Chapter 5 Daughters of the Enchantress of Numbers and Grandma COBOL
pages = 460
id = ISBN 0813521971
* cite book
last = Ceruzzi
first = Paul E.
title = A History of Modern Computing
publisher = MIT Press
date = 2003
chapter = Chapter 3 The Early History of Software, 1952-1968
pages = 89-90
id = ISBN 0262532034
* cite book
last = Hashagen
first = Ulf
last = Keil-Slawik
first = Reinhard
last = Norberg
first = Arthur
title = History of Computing - Software Issues
publisher = Springer
date = 2002
chapter = Part 4 Software as Labor Process
pages = 159
id = ISBN 3540426647