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

The most irritating part of it...

[Eryq]

I got my master's in Comp Sci at UPenn in '89 (I used to walk past some of the remnants of ENIAC on display there, every day). And I can't help but be saddened by this:

She hoped to major in the field [mathematics] at the University of Pennsylvania but was discouraged by a professor who thought that women belonged at home.

I'm glad she finally got her chance to shine during the war, but who knows what else she might have accomplished, had someone's idiotic prejudices not dissuaded her into working for the Farm Journal?

Stupid git.

Then again, maybe he just meant /home...