Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton

StefanL, 29.11.05, 22:11

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.

Read more here and many places else.

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Charles Herzfeld

StefanL, 24.11.05, 01:20

Charles Herzfeld was born in Vienna to an assimilated (even catholic) Jewish Family, the son of August Herzfeld and nephew of physicist Karl Herzfeld.

He holds an engineering degree from the Catholic University of America (B.S., 1945) and one in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1951). He worked as a physicist at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, Maryland from 1951 to 1953, and at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington from 1953 to 1955.

After several years with the National Bureau of Standards, he joined ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) in '61 and later on became Assistant Director. He served as the Director of ARPA from 1965 to 1967, and was instrumental in setting up the ARPAnet:

"In February, 1966, Taylor approached the then head of ARPA, Charles Herzfeld, and made a proposal for the creation of an interactive computer network, linking different computer systems together for the sharing of information. After a twenty-minute discussion with Taylor describing this proposal, Herzfeld approved of Taylor's concept and signed a provision of $1 million for the initial project funds ..."

A google search in domain .at renders 3 links. (Addendum 2017: 14 links and 2 pics)

I could not find a full biography on the web. Here's an oral history interview with Mr. Herzfeld from the Charles Babbage Institute. (Addendum 2017: not anymore)

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Danny Cohen

StefanL, 16.08.05, 18:49

Danny Cohen, was a Myricom Fellow until he retired. At Myricom he worked on Myrinet, a cost-effective, high-performance (multi Gbps), packet-communication and switching technology that is widely used to interconnect clusters of computers.

Mr. Cohen earned his BSc at the Technion (Israel) and his PhD at Harvard. Prior to founding Myricom, he was a researcher at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI), where he started and led several research projects, including Internet Concepts, realtime communication, realtime packet speech and packet video, ATOMIC, MOSIS, and FAST. The USC/ISI ATOMIC LAN, based on Caltech Mosaic components, was developed under ARPA sponsorship by Cohen and his research group, was the research prototype of Myrinet.

Mr. Cohen has been on the Computer Science faculty at Harvard, Technion, and Caltech.

He might perhaps be best known for his coining of the computer terms, Big Endian and Little Endian, in his landmark article, On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace (COMPUTER, 1981), which borrows heavily from earlier work by Dr. Swift. Wrote some IENs and RFCs too.

NVP (Network Voice Protocol) was first implemented in December 1973 by Internet researcher Danny Cohen of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Southern California, with funding from ARPA's Network Secure Communications (NSC) program.

Mr. Cohen appears in a lot of Internet related wikipedia articles but as of today has no article of his own yet.

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Lorinda Cherry

StefanL, 04.09.04, 17:26 Lorinda Cherry received her Masters in computer science from Princeton's Stevens College in 1969. Computer science then consisted mostly of studying Turing Machines and numerical analysis, rather than compiler or data structure courses. About these studies she says, "...I'm not sure that anyone who was here at that time was really a computer scientist. I think everyone's training was in something else, it was in math or engineering."

Cherry joined Unix in 1972 as an assembly language programmer, originally with the purpose of building Unix systems. Because each had to be hand-crafted with the proper device drivers, it was important for someone on the project to do this work. However, she soon became involved with text tools.

If people know her, it's mostly for co-authorship of eqn and bc. She co-authored eqn with Brian Kernighan which might have eclipsed her fame a bit.

As we can see from an interview (see below) the text corpus on which a lot of early text processing development in Unix was done, were the Federalist papers typed into Unix from a paperback via teletype terminal. Excuse for lot of the work was "statistical analysis of authorship" research.

A more detailed precis on Cherry and her work, by Malika Seth An Interview with Cherry at Princeton's 'History of Science' Site BC − An Arbitrary Precision Desk-Calculator Language (pdf)

On Quality and Naturality

Cherry: No, the graphics is easy. The hard part is getting a language that you can teach to a math typist that will just flow off her fingertips to complicated graphics. I think the language part of that is what was neat about it. It’s still what’s neat about it. The graphics part of it, I think Tech is still better as far as what EQN does and what Tech does. From a mathematical standpoint I think you’ll find Tech better, but I don’t think Tech stuff is anywhere near as natural to work with. That may be very prejudiced, I don’t have a…

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Nolan Bushnell

StefanL, 22.08.04, 19:24

Robert Jung's Atari Timeline

An Excerpt:

1976 Nolan Bushnell hires Steve Jobs to create Breakout. Jobs joins with Steve Wozniak. They design the game in five days. Bushnell pays Jobs $5,000; Jobs pays $350 to Wozniak, and takes sole credit for Breakout.

(October) Seeking funds to finish Stella for manufacturing, Nolan Bushnell sells Atari Inc. to Warner Communications for $28 million. Bushnell is named Chairman of the Board, and Joe Keenan remains as President.

More nice links www.hut.fi www.videotopia.com

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