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

Loss and Gain

[The Great Wakka]

Sometimes, the world loses a great person. While her accomplishments may seem minor compared to those of the modern-day programmers, she laid an important stone in the foundation of modern computer science. Can you imagine life without her? One whole section of a computer's logic would be eliminated. Perhaps she made some obscure discovery that tomorrow will change the way we think about computers.

Re:Loss and Gain

[selan]

I realize that your comment was meant as praise, but it really belittles what she achieved.

How could her accomplishments possibly be minor compared with today's programmers? Today we may code operating systems or apps, but she helped to invent programming. She did "change the way we think about computers."

Read the obit first, it's very interesting and you might actually learn something.

Re:Loss and Gain

[Usquebaugh]

"One whole section of a computer's logic would be eliminated."

I doubt it, probably just attributed to another person. There are very few ideas that are not part of the society they spring from. It just depends on who is recognised as being first.

Something to think about.

[Matt2000]

From the article "By the completion of the ENIAC project in 1946, work that once took 30 hours to compute instead took 15 seconds."

Since most of us were born after the advent of computers we take for granted that mundane computation tasks can be automated for fairly low cost and at great time savings. However, for all that technological progress has been hailed in the last 20 years, is there any task that we have received this kind of improvement in efficiency on?

Are we becoming too focused on the day to day improvements in computing, each one of ever decreasing relevance to people who actually use the computer?

How can we focus more in the future on finding the areas where our efforts can be best utilized to produce efficiency gains of this sort, rather than Microsofting everything by putting 74 new features into a product just so a new product can be sold?

These kind of questions stand as the things that can best be answered by open source, where we are not constrained by profit. This should be what we think about in the future, rather than what featuress we can copy from someone else's software just because they have it and we don't.

Re:dance on her grave

[MisterBlister]

COBOL and FORTRAN were both wildly successful computer languages. They may seem a bit dated now, but considering their age and the fact that they were designed to work well on computers that are ridiculously less powerful than the system you have now (even if you're using a 286!) and factoring in that they were some of the first high level computer languages, with little research or history to draw upon, they were rather amazing accomplishments.

What languages have YOU designed?

Female Programmers

[Lunastorm]

And I've always thought that the first programmers were all men. I do wonder: is there is a higher percentage of female programmers today or has it fallen in time?
As for those who are belittling her use of mnemonics, you shouldn't take it for granted. Imagine having to type out 'file system consistency checker' instead of fsck among other commands.

Re:Female Programmers

[devphil]

No, it's a question of perceived status. At that time, being a computer -- recall that 'computer' was the title of the person doing the math, not the noisy room-sized thing you did the math on -- was considered something of a drudge job. The men discovered the algorithms, the women did the computing.

Later, as the idea of working with a (machine) computer as a career became more fashionable, more and more men moved into the field, as it was no longer considered "merely" women's work.

Remember Lady Ada Lovelace, the first programmer? Babbage couldn't be bothered to do the menial work of actually designing algorithms. Then the act of designing algorithms lost some of its stigma, and men took over. Finally the act of actually coding the algorithms has lost its stigma, and so I (a male) can sit here making a fabulous living as a coder, while my equally-talented coder girlfriend doesn't make as much money.

The glass ceiling is still there. It just shifts up and down to include/exclude different professions as culture changes. :-(

To a great geek, from a proud one, I salute you

[Anonymous Coward]

Ms. Holberton, this Jolt's for you. You are one of the few early computer geek vetrans of war, an honor that few can claim. Thank you for what you have done for my country, and my profession.

Wheelier wheel

[NickFusion]

So what are you suggesting, that we invent a wheel that is an order of magnitude...wheelier?

We're talking about a basic shift in the way things are done, from humans adding colums of numbers to an industrial number-adding machine.

You don't get the next big thing from microsoft, or from open source, or from programming at all.

You get it from inventing the next widget that automates, streamlines, accelerates some human activity.

What is it? A better word processor? Nope. Who knows. An automated intuiter? An enlarged and speed up memory core for the human brain? Something that turns dioxin into peanut butter?

Ginger?

Damned if I know, kemosabi. But when you're making those kind of calls, you're in the high country....

I find it amusing ....

[os2fan]

that, when the mainframes ruled, that computing was associated with DATA (ie bits, bytes, fields and records), as in Automatic Data Processing, Datamation &c, but now that data is easy to come by, it's INFORMATION (eg Information Technology).

I wonder how many IT people suggest technologies that are not computer-related: eg how many people suggest paper cards as a solution. I know I have.

You see, once you start fiddling around with the hardware like Betty H did, you start using it wisely. It is one of the reasons that Unix works so well.