| Betty Holberton | |
|---|---|
| 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 - David Taylor Model Basin |
| Known for | ENIAC |
| Spouse | 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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Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia in 1917. On her first day of classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Holberton'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, Holberton 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.
During World War II while the men were fighting, the Army needed the women to compute ballistics trajectories. Holberton 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", 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. 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, 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, wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and also the first statistical analysis package which was used for the 1950 US Census. Holberton 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. 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").
She died on December 8 2001 in Rockville, Maryland.[1][2]
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.
It is from her suggestion that grey, rather than black, was chosen as the color for UNIVAC computers, atypical to others at the time.