Frances Elizabeth Holberton
Early Life and Education
Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia in 1917. When she began to study at the University of Pennsylvania, her math professor said she should be home raising children. Holberton then decided to study journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far a-field. Journalism was also one of the few fields open to women as a career in the 1940s.
ENIVAC Career
During World War II , Holberton was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to work as a "computer", and was soon chosen to be one of the six women to program the ENIAC. Classified as "sub-professionals", 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.
After World War II, Holberton worked at Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards. 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.She also wrote the first generative programming system , Sort/Merge (a mainframe program to sort records in a file into a specified order, merge pre-sorted files into a sorted file, or copy selected records ), and wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census.
Holberton also 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 was an important figure in the development of early standards for the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages with Grace Hopper; her work with COBOL being significant in that despite being updated and revised multiple times since, COBOL is still used today.
Achievements
In 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. 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. She died on December 8, 2001 in Rockville, Maryland.
Information adapted from :
Famous Women in Computing originally written as part of LinuxChix magazine. [cited 10 April 2015]
http://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-frances-snyder-holberton [cited 10 April 2015]
Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia in 1917. When she began to study at the University of Pennsylvania, her math professor said she should be home raising children. Holberton then decided to study journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far a-field. Journalism was also one of the few fields open to women as a career in the 1940s.
ENIVAC Career
During World War II , Holberton was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to work as a "computer", and was soon chosen to be one of the six women to program the ENIAC. Classified as "sub-professionals", 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.
After World War II, Holberton worked at Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards. 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.She also wrote the first generative programming system , Sort/Merge (a mainframe program to sort records in a file into a specified order, merge pre-sorted files into a sorted file, or copy selected records ), and wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census.
Holberton also 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 was an important figure in the development of early standards for the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages with Grace Hopper; her work with COBOL being significant in that despite being updated and revised multiple times since, COBOL is still used today.
Achievements
In 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the other original ENIAC programmers. 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. She died on December 8, 2001 in Rockville, Maryland.
Information adapted from :
Famous Women in Computing originally written as part of LinuxChix magazine. [cited 10 April 2015]
http://www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer-frances-snyder-holberton [cited 10 April 2015]