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 six U.S. programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ( ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

Career and career

Holberton studied at the University of Pennsylvania journalism. In the 1940 years this was one of the few studies, which was also open for women and a career enabled.

During the Second World War Holberton was accepted at the Moore School of Engineering to be there as a so-called Computor. Subsequently, it was decided that the Holberton should be one of six women for the ENIAC program. You programmed on behalf of the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the United States Army together with Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Jean Bartik and Frances Bilas the then ENIAC calculations for ballistic trajectories carry out electronically.

At the beginning of the ENIAC program, the women were allowed to work only with blueprints and schematics to perform the programming. The ENIAC was unveiled on February 15, 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. The cost of the ENIAC at that time included 500,000 U.S. dollars.

After the Second World War Holberton was with Remington Rand, and the National Bureau of Standards operate. In 1959, she held the senior position at the Authority Marine David W. Taylor Model Basin. She developed the C-10 command code for the Universal Automatic Calculator ( Univac ) and designed a control panel with a numeric keypad of the keyboard. She convinced the engineers of the Univac to change the then- standard color for computer (gray- beige) on black.

It developed the first statistical analysis method, which was used in 1950 for the U.S. Census ( United States Census ). Later, as an associate of the National Bureau of Standards, she has been instrumental in two revisions of the Fortran programming language Fortran 77 and Fortran 90, involved.

Awards

She received in 1997 as the only woman in the ENIAC program Augusta Ada Lovelace Award to the highest honor of a woman in the field of computing and programming, and the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award. Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women Technology International Hall of Fame.