Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton

Q: What are you most proud of?

A: The design of the instruction code of UNIVAC 1 and the code called C-10. I was in engineering in those days and I had just come from programming the ENIAC. That code was mostly designed at night while I was laying awake. My daughter said it was a form of psychology. I always stayed in the background and got most things done without people knowing that. I had to learn to speak out and it effects me today. We have sessions at the nursing home and I speak up and they all sit there.

One of Holberton's first commercially available programs, in use in 1952, was a routine that read and sorted data stored on UNIVAC tape drives. Donald Knuth called that "the first major 'software' routine ever developed for automatic programming.

"Betty Holberton was a real software pioneer," says Knuth, professor emeritus at Stanford University and author of the three-volume "The Art of Computer Programming", the profession's most definitive tractatus yet.

Mrs. Holberton, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was one of six women recruited by the United States Army to program ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), a machine which is credited as being the first all-electronic all-digital computer.

This woman's got no wikipedia article yet and right now I am too lazy to conform. Maybe tomorrow. Of course she's got one in the meantime.

More Quotes and Memories

"Betty had an amazing logical mind, and she solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake", Jean J. Bartik, another of the Eniac programmers, recalled, when interviewed.

After leaving the army with ENIAC "inventors" Eckert and Mauchly to develop UNIVAC, in 1953, Mrs. Holberton joined the Navy's Applied Math Lab at the David Taylor Model Basin in Maryland as the supervisor of advanced programming, where she worked until 1966. In 1959, she was a crucial member of the committee that developed Cobol, or Common Business Oriented Language.

For the rest of her job life Mrs. Holberton worked at the National Bureau of Standards. She lived to the age of 84 and stayed devoted to making programming easier.

The Eniac, Univac and the Navy brought forth strange people. Let's hear it for Eniac, the US Navy and Betty Holberton.

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