Betty Holberton
| 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(s) | 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.
Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917. 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. Instead, Holberton decided to study journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far afield. Journalism was also one of the few fields open to women as a career in the 1940s.
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. It had cost around $487,000, equivalent to $6,740,000 in 2016. 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."
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. She was one of those who wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census.
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