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

Parrallel processing from the start.

[Alien54]

The Army chose six women, including Mrs. Holberton, to program the ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons and filled a room. The women had to route data and electronic pulses through 3,000 switches, 18,000 vacuum tubes and dozens of cables.

"There were no manuals," one of the women, Kay McNulty Mauchley Antonelli, later told Kathleen Melymuka for an interview in Computer World. "They gave us all the blueprints, and we could ask the engineers anything. We had to learn how the machine was built, what each tube did. We had to study how the machine worked and figure out how to do a job on it. So we went right ahead and taught ourselves how to program."

Mrs. Holberton took responsibility for the central unit that directed program sequences. Because the ENIAC was a parallel processor that could execute multiple program sections at once, programming the master unit was the toughest challenge of her 50-year career, she later told Kleiman.

Now that is a programming challenge.

Imagine that the first programs were parrallel processing problems from the start, with no manuals or instructions in programing because they had to invent it all first. And the pressure of being in wartime as well.

very impressive indeed. one of those things that get done because no one knows it is impossible yet.