Granddaughter of an astronomer who grew up with classical literature and language,
Frances Elizabeth Snyder Holberton, was left-handed, cross-eyed and constantly made
fun of by her classmates. When she began to study at the University of Pennsylvania,
her math professor said she should be home raising children. She believed computers
would flourish only if they were easy to program and operate. Betty said she spent half
her time trying to figure out what people needed in computers, and the other half convincing
an engineer it was his idea, so the work would be done. She led a committee devising the
first language allowing programs to be run on more than one computer, Cobol.
Betty Holberton was a computing pioneer who was one of the six original programmers of
ENIAC 50 years ago. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was
developed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania
and had been completed in the fall of 1945 and revealed to the public in February 1946. It
was the first operational, general-purpose, electronic digital computer. It was pursued
by the Army as a means to speed up calculations required to produce firing tables.
ENIAC was first used to solve an important problem for the Manhattan Project.
The ENIAC is important historically, because it laid the foundations for the modern
electronic computing industry. More than any other machine, the ENIAC demonstrated that
high-speed digital computing was possible using the then-available vacuum tube
technology.
BETTY HOLBERTON'S PLACES OF WORK
1942-The Moore School and continued this work at the U.S. Army Ballistics Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground until 1947
1947-1950-the Eckert-Mauchly Electronic Control Company to help with the development of the UNIVAC
1950-1953-Remington-Rand
1953-1966-Applied Mathematics Laboratory, David Taylor Model Basin
1966-1983-National Bureau of Standards
She influenced the design of portions of the hardware for the UNIVAC as well as much of
the software of the first UNIVAC, which was delivered to the U.S. Census bureau in March,
1951, to be used to process the 1950 census results. She concocted the first sort-merge
generator, for UNIVAC I, which lead the way for Grace Murray Hopper to develop the
earliest compiler. She played an active and influential role in the design and standardization
of both COBOL and FORTRAN languages. Grace Hopper later described Betty Holberton as
being the best programmer she had ever known.
