Betty Holberton
Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton (born Frances Elizabeth Snyder ; born March 7, 1917 in Philadelphia ; † December 8, 2001 in Rockville, Maryland ) was one of the six American programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first universally applicable, electronic digital computer.
Background and career
Holberton studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania . Originally she wanted to become an astronomer (there were several astronomers in her family), but a professor at the university who opposed women in the field, put her off. After graduation, she worked for the Farm Journal, for which she compiled statistics.
During the Second World War, Holberton was admitted to the Moore School of Engineering to work there as a so-called computor. It was subsequently decided that Holberton should be one of the six women for the ENIAC program. On behalf of the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the United States Army, she programmed the ENIAC, together with Kathleen Antonelli , Marlyn Wescoff , Ruth Lichterman , Jean Bartik and Frances Bilas , in order to carry out calculations for ballistic trajectories electronically.
At the beginning of the ENIAC program, women were only allowed to work with blueprints and circuit diagrams to carry out the programming. The ENIAC was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, at a cost of $ 500,000 at the time.
After World War II, Holberton worked for Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards . In 1959 she was head of the programming research department at the David W. Taylor Model Basin Ship Research Institute. Together with Ida Rhodes, she developed the C-10 assembly language for the Universal Automatic Calculator (Univac) and designed a control panel with a numeric keypad next to the keyboard.
She developed the first statistical analysis method, which was used for the United States Census in 1950 . Later, as a contributor to the National Bureau of Standards , she was instrumental in two revisions of the Fortran programming language, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90.
Grace Murray Hopper called her the best programmer she'd ever met.
Awards
In 1997 she was the only woman in the ENIAC program to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award , the highest honor for a woman in computing and programming, and the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award. Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women Technology International Hall of Fame .
Web links
- New York Times - Pioneer Programmer of Early Computers December 15, 2001
- Rachel K. Adelson: Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton, Association for Women in Computing, 1997 ( January 9, 2008 memento in the Internet Archive )
- Eniacprogrammers.org - Women program the ENIAC
Individual evidence
- ^ The First General-purpose Electronic Computer internetlooks.com - accessed February 10, 2013
- ^ Rachel K. Adelson: Programmed to Succeed: Betty Holberton, Association for Women in Computing
- ↑ WITI Hall of Fame, 1997 ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - Accessed February 10, 2013
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Holberton, Betty |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Holberton, Frances Elizabeth; Snyder, Frances Elizabeth (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 7, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Philadelphia |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 8, 2001 |
| Place of death | Rockville, Maryland |