| Frances Elizabeth Holberton | |
|---|---|
 Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program the ENIAC in BRL building 328. (U.S. Army photo) |
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| Born | Frances Elizabeth Snyder March 7, 1917 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | December 8, 2001 (aged 84) Rockville, Maryland |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Computer programmer |
| Employer | Moore School of Engineering Remington Rand National Bureau of Standards |
| Known for | ENIAC |
| Spouse(s) | John Vaughan Holberton |
| Children | Priscilla Holberton Pamela Holberton |
Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
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Early life and education
Frances Elizabeth "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.[citation needed] Instead, Betty decided to study journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far a-field.[citation needed] Journalism was also one of the few programs of study open to women during that time.[citation needed]
Career
During World War II while the men were fighting, 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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
Death
She died on December 8, 2001 in Rockville, Maryland.[1][2]
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.[citation needed]
Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
References
- ^ "Frances E. Holberton, 84, Early Computer Programmer". New York Times. December 17, 2001. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E1D7163EF934A25751C1A9679C8B63. Retrieved 2008-06-07. "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."
- ^ "Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84". Government Computer News. January 7, 2002. http://www.gcn.com/print/21_1/17702-1.html. Retrieved 2008-06-07. "Frances “Betty” Snyder Holberton, a pioneer in programming languages and other aspects of computing, died Dec. 8 in Rockville, Md. She was 84."
External links
- Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton at the Association for Women in Computing website
- Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84
- 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.
- Frances E. Holberton Papers, circa 1950s-1980s. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Further reading
- Stanley, Autumn (1933). "Chapter 5 Daughters of the Enchantress of Numbers and Grandma COBOL". Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. The Scarecrow Press Inc.. p. 460. ISBN 0813521971.
- Ceruzzi, Paul E. (2003). "Chapter 3 The Early History of Software, 1952-1968". A History of Modern Computing. MIT Press. pp. 89–90. ISBN 0262532034.
- Norberg, Arthur (2002). "Part 4 Software as Labor Process". History of Computing - Software Issues. Springer. p. 159. ISBN 3540426647.
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