Betty Holberton

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Betty Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was one of the original ENIAC crew.

She was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia in 1917. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in English and journalism, although she had excelled in mathematics during high school. She was hired by the Moore School of Engineering during World War II to compute ballistics trajectories and was selected for as one of the programmers for the ENIAC computer which was designed to perform these calculations electronically. She was the inventor of the mnemonic instruction set (called C-10) for the BINAC, which Grace Hopper described as "the basis for all subsequent programming languages." It has been said that in creating this, she started the movement away from switch assemblies and towards keyboards as the primary input device for computers.

She also wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and the first statistical analysis package (for the 1950 US Census). She participated in the early standards development for the COBOL and Fortran programming languages.

She was the person who suggested grey as the colour for UNIVAC computers (rather than black as it was at the time).

In 1997 she received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, which is the highest honor 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

[edit] External links

• Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton at the Association for Women in Computing website
• Computer pioneer Betty Holberton dies at 84Holberton, Betty