RIP: Betty Holberton, Original Eniac Programmer

DecoDragon writes "Betty Holberton, one of the original ENIAC programmers, died on December 8th. An obituary describing her many achivements as well as her work on the ENIAC can be found in the Washington Post. Her accomplishments included contributing to the development of Cobol and Fortran, and coming up with using mnemonic characters for commands (i.e. a for add). She was awarded the Lovelace Award for extraordinary acomplishments in computing from the Asssociation for Women in Computing, and the Computer Pioneer Award from the IEEE Computer Society for "development of the first sort-merge generator for the Univac which inspired the first ideas about compilation.""

Comments

Big ass memorial

[Anonymous Coward]

They should errect the ENIAC like the Vietnam Wall somewhere and scrawl all the dude's names on the back of it... ;)

This woman rocked in many aspects...

[haggar]

First of all, she is one of the first programmers in the history of computing.
Second, she is probably the programmer with the longest active career: she started before the war, and retired in 1983.
Third, hey, she had a husband 33 years younger than her!

I think she got a few things worth of envy, huh?

Re:Loss and Gain

[NonSequor]

Computers already are user fiendly.

Re:The Origin of Pale Grey Boxes, etc.

[Hektor_Troy]

"[...] and persuaded engineers to replace the UNIVAC's black exterior with the gray-beige tone that came to be the universal color of computers."

Just goes to show, that even great minds make cockups from time to time!