Frances Elizabeth Holberton was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC.
15 Facts About Betty Holberton
2.
Betty Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917.
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Betty Holberton's father was John Amos Snyder, her mother was Frances J Morrow, and she was the third child in a family of eight children.
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Betty Holberton studied journalism, because its curriculum let her travel far afield.
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Betty Holberton was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to work as a "computer" and chosen to be one of the six women to program the ENIAC.
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Betty Holberton was the Chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin in 1959.
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Betty Holberton 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.
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Betty Holberton was one of those who wrote the first generative programming system.
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Betty Holberton used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function, and wrote the code to employ a group of ten tape drives to read and write data as needed during the process.
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Betty Holberton wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census.
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Betty Holberton worked with John Mauchly to develop the C-10 instruction set for BINAC, which is considered to be the prototype of all modern programming languages.
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Betty Holberton participated in the development of early standards for the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages with Grace Hopper.
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Betty Holberton died on December 8,2001, in Rockville, Maryland, aged 84, of heart disease, diabetes, and complications from a stroke she had suffered several years before.
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Betty Holberton was survived by her husband John Vaughn Holberton and her daughters Pamela and Priscilla.
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In 1976, Betty Holberton was honored with a Department of Commerce Silver Medal in recognition of her work on revision of the national standard for FORTRAN and the development of test routines to test compliance.