Betty Holberton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Frances Elizabeth Snyder March 7, 1917 |
| Died | December 8, 2001 (aged 84) |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Computer Scientist |
| Employer(s) | - Moore School of Engineering - Remington Rand - National Bureau of Standards - David Taylor Model Basin |
| Known for | ENIAC |
| Spouse | John Vaughan Holberton |
| Children | Priscilla Holberton Pamela Holberton |
Frances Elizabeth Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Holberton invented breakpoints in computer debugging.[1]
Early life and education edit
Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917.
Holberton studied journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far afield.[2] Journalism was also one of the few fields open to women as a career in the 1940s.[3] On her first day of classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Holberton's math professor asked her if she wouldn't be better off at home raising children.[3]
Career edit
During World War II while the Army needed to compute ballistics trajectories, many women were hired for this task. Holberton was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to work as a "computor" and chosen to be one of the six women to program the ENIAC. Classified as "subprofessionals", Holberton, along with Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas, programmed the ENIAC to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically for the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL), US Army.
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. During her time working on ENIAC she had many productive ideas that came to her overnight, leading other programmers to jokingly state that she "solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake."[4]
The ENIAC was unveiled on February 15, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania.[5][6] It had cost around $487,000, equivalent to $8,575,000 in 2023.[6]
After World War II, Holberton 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, designing control panels that put the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and persuading engineers to replace the Univac's black exterior with the gray-beige tone that came to be the universal color of computers.[7]
She was one of those who wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE). Holberton used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function, and wrote the code to employ a group of ten tape drives to read and write data as needed during the process.[8] She wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census.
In 1953 she was made a supervisor of advanced programming in a part of the Navy’s Applied Math lab in Maryland, where she stayed until 1966.[4] Holberton worked with John Mauchly to develop the C-10 instruction set 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.[9] Later, as an employee of the National Bureau of Standards, she was very active in the first two revisions of the Fortran language standard ("FORTRAN 77" and "Fortran 90").
Մահ edit
Նա մահացել է 84 տարեկանում 2001 թվականի դեկտեմբերի 8-ին Ռոքվիլ քաղաքում, Մերիլենդ, սրտի հիվանդության, շաքարախտի և ինսուլտից ստացած բարդությունների պատճառով` մի քանի տարվա տառապանքից հետո:[4][10] Նրան փրկել են ամուսինը` Ջոն Վաուգ Հոլբերտոնը և իր դուստրերը` Պամելան և Պրիսցիլան:[4]
Awards edit
In 1997 she was the only woman of the original six who programmed the ENIAC to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the highest award given by the Association of Women in Computing.[11]
Also in 1997, she received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society for developing the sort-merge generator which, according to IEEE, "inspired the first ideas about compilation."[11]
Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers.[11]
Legacy edit
Holberton School, a project-based school for software engineers based in San Francisco, was founded in her honor in 2015.[1]
See also edit
References edit
- ^ Abbate, Janet (2012), Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing, MIT Press, p. 32, ISBN 9780262018067
- ^ "Betty Holberton Video". ovguide.com. Archived from the original on 2013-10-05. Retrieved 2012-06-05.
- ^ a b Gay, Martin (10 April 2018). Recent Advances and Issues in Computers. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 9781573562270 – via Google Books.
- ^ a b c d Lohr, Steve (Dec 17, 2001). "Frances E. Holberton, 84, Early Computer Programmer". NYTimes. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
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.
- ^ "ENIAC Programmers Project". ENIAC Programmers Project.
- ^ a b "On Computers: historical development of computers". internetlooks.com.
- ^ Levy, Claudia (December 15, 2001). "Frances Holberton, 84; Pioneer Programmer of Early Computers". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Beyer, Kurt (2012). Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. London, Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 198. ISBN 9780262517263.
- ^ Fritz, W. Barkley (1996). "The Women of ENIAC" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 8 (3): 17. doi:10.1109/85.511940.
- ^ "Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84". Government Computer News. January 7, 2002. 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.
- ^ a b c "ENIAC Programmers Project - Email List". 12 December 2008. Archived from the original on 12 December 2008.
External links edit
- "Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton". Archived from the original on 2008-01-09. Retrieved 2006-03-07.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) at the Association for Women in Computing website - Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84, Government Computer News, January 5, 2002
- 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 the ENIAC and LARC computers, her design of operating systems, and her applications programming.
- Frances E. Holberton Papers, circa 1950s-1980s. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
Further reading edit
- 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 978-0-8135-2197-8.
- Ceruzzi, Paul E. (2003). "Chapter 3 The Early History of Software, 1952-1968". A History of Modern Computing. MIT Press. pp. 89–90. ISBN 978-0-262-53203-7.
- Norberg, Arthur (2002). "Part 4 Software as Labor Process". History of Computing - Software Issues. Springer. p. 159. ISBN 978-3-540-42664-6.
Category:Scientists from Philadelphia
Category:American computer programmers
Category:American women computer scientists
Category:1917 births
Category:2001 deaths
Category:American computer scientists
Category:COBOL
Category:20th-century women scientists
Category:20th-century American scientists
Category:Disease-related deaths in Maryland