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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.""
for cleaning and cooking... the two c's
awful sexist i know
boy, that was a stretch. how'd she come up with that?
The TTBs weep for her.
Hmmm... what will we call the Addition command?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
They should errect the ENIAC like the Vietnam Wall somewhere and scrawl all the dude's names on the back of it... ;)
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.
Everything is mainstream now.
Isn't she also the person who coined the term "bug" after finding a moth in the system that was shorting it out?
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
We know who to blame for both fortran AND cobol! Go defecate on her grave!
This one girl holding a DILDO up the old tatter
while another girl was holding her tits n stuff
and then it all went wham! And I was like looking
Whaaats happening?
discuss ->
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.
It was Gace Hopper Look at this site they have picture of the Bug.
Help fight continental drift.
*shudder*
I heard from someone that women were only good for three things and two of which are cleaning clothes and cooking food.
(o Y o) So why do they bother achieving such
\ / status when they are only good for
( # ) fucking?
/ / \ \
decompile her code.
...
...
Another one for the bit bucket
while my compiler gently weeps
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
See the page on 1945, where it says:
"Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers."
Now we got folks who what their case midnight black.
But given all of the design issues we have seen, it is interesting to note that the human interface problem was being considered from the very beginning.
[Insert your Microsoft insult joke here]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There is a nice picture a her here. just if anyone is interested...
Betty Holberton, original Eniac Programmer, was found dead in her Maine apartment today. You may or may not like her work, but you cannot deny her contributions to the art of science fiction writing. We will miss her.
Appearantly, she fell and broke her hip but couldn't reach her medic alert bracelet in time. Her muscles gradually eroded, and she starved to death. Flies began eating her carcass. The flies will miss her tasty flesh, and I, her beautiful naked, wrinkly, boobies.
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...
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
"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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
You die too easily.
"I know what you mean, scoob, ol' buddy. she ain't much of teen hearthrobb. She is... uhhhhhhhhh-gleeeeeeeeeeeee whith a capital YUCK in my dictionary. Oh why does Fredie and Daphne always go off together and me, you, and thelma get chased by the ghouls and ghosts?"
I'm sorry, but I have to take issue with this revisionist history being pushed down our throats by feminists sympathizers.
Clearly, this woman was not the "original" Eniac programmer. And even if she was, which is more important--building a computer or programming it? Anyone can do software, but hardware takes brains and persistence to do right.
Why don't we give the inventor of the Eniac this kind of credit? Or what about the countless hundreds of male computer pioneers who remain anonymous while this individual steals the spotlight simply because of her sex?
I'm all for celebrating the accomplishments of pioneers in computing. But affirmative action has no place in history.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
who ever heard of women programmers?
Remember, kids, there's nothing stopping girls from being great computer users! Like my wife, for instance, who has revolutionized her recipie collection by learning how to use Microsoft Access. And hey, get her a cute little iMac and she'll never have to leave the kitchen! I'll bet that Betty definitely had to leave the kitchen in order to work with her computer -- she may have even had to shame her sex by working outside the house! How awful!
You have to really monitor your woman's computer use, though, or even the most flat-chested of girls will start to pork up. You see, to the female, a PC is just like a television: an excuse to sit on her ass and overeat while passively staring at a glowing screen. The Internet has become the third-leading cause of female ass-expansion, behind Jenny Jones and Friends. If she starts to get a bit too meaty, just fuck her in the ass, and after the fortieth or fiftieth anal reaming, she'll catch on. Unless she's blonde, in which case you may have to resort to a Filthy Sanchez. Woah!
-- The_Messenger
...the first BEOWULF Clusters were women working together!
Yo when are we giving out the Miss Crimpy Cable award, the Miss ALU award, and the Miss DSCK Probe Award? Oh wow all my favorite women in one room with a computer... meow, rairrrrrr.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
to say this column is being handled mostly by guy's... im not saying thats bad thing... is just a fact ;)
Admiral Grace Hopper to you.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
ahahah, that's some straight up funny shit ('cause it's soo true), mod this one up!
Haha! Yes, I have to completely agree! So funny, yet so true!
The folk etymology of "bug" is that, in the early days of electronic computing, an actual insect flew into the innards of the Harvard Mark II, and caused a malfunction (this did happen), and that is where we get the word bug (in the sense of a flaw in the process). It seems however that the word was already in use in that sense in industrial manufacturing circles at the end of the 19th century.
(New Hacker's Dictionary)
What were you expecting?
what other famous woman programmers?
Hardly any.
Why?
Because the chance a caucasian female has an IQ of 124 is a staggering eight times less likely than a male has.
Almost all retarded people are male, so the average IQ of both sexes is ironically 100, as per definition.
But the bell curve for mammal IQ shows that the longer a person goes through life before puberty, and puberty's effects on the brain, the higher the chance the animal might be super smart.
Tufts university showed that sexy women with large chests have lower IQ than masculine looking less curvy women.
And "The BEll Curve" famouse book is chock full of redundant data meticulously showing why so few skilled scientists, engineers, programmers, chemists, biologists, etc are female.
That is why so many men dominate programming... especially the competitive world of mass-market shrink wrapped programming.
I get so sick of this "emilia earhart" style back slapping of Girl Power. There were two people who died in emilia earharts plane that fateful day, one was her male navigator, whom also was skilled in things like morse code and many other disciplines ms earhart lacked.
The only good female coders I have seen are the kind of so-called women that attend CalTech. And I do mean "so-called."
She should be burned in effigy
Seriously though, it's still a big problem that women are underrepresented in comp sci./programming. While I don't particularily respect Cobol and Fortran as languages, I really respect the technical hurdles that the pioneers faced and the personal/scientific achievements of people like the dearly departed.
The worst part is that it occurs to me that the majority of us haven't learned to leave this legacy behind (rant on archaic languages and programming techniques) and the lack of real progress in this respect. 50 years and we don't have a significantly better language than Smalltalk (ok, maybe Lisp).
More political correctness for the dickless wonders.
Face facts... there are almost **NO** high IQ females inhabiting most of the skilled engineering professions.
Its genetics.
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.
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....
What were you expecting?
I'm asking because I know of 4 different kinds. How do you perform yours. har har har matey
And you'll find Bill Gates.
Jolt? You degenerate. Real geeks drink coffee.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
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?
Sigged!
Yeah, I remembered the "Rear" as I pressed "Submit," but I wasn't certain how much of a difference that makes to the official rank. I guess it's just like the subdivisions in a general's rank. (I haven't done as much work with the Navy as with the other branches.)
She also won a Turing Award, didn't she? In '74 or '78?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
My computer at college in 1981 was something nearing the end of its life. It was an 8086 with 4K of ram, and a paper tape drive. To boot it, you load up the tape, and load three values into ram (by a series of eight switches and a "set" switch), and then send a command 377 to the processor. This would jump it tot a location in memory, and then run the commands that you loaded there (effectively JMP address), which would then run the KEX program. KEX was a driver for a teletype. After that, you input through the keyboard by assembler code.
Compared to that, mnenomics like a for add and b for bring would have been a godsend.
Of fortran, basic and cobol. In the days of wire wound core, each bit of the byte made the machine more expensive, and there was some comprimise on the size of the bit. Fortran was designed to run on a six-bit machine. Even Knuth's MIX is underpowered by modern computers.
BASIC is intended to run in small memory. MS made their packet by bumming it into 4K of ram, with a point and shoot interface.
In effect, you moved a cursor around the FAT and entered on the file you wanted to run or edit, at least on the tandy 1000. Still, I built a RPN multibase hackable calculator in 6K of code.
Where BASIC comes off the rails is that people start using it as a general programming language. Its inability to pass parameters to subroutines is easily overcome
Thus var1 = fn3130{x, v, z} can be written as:
A1=x:A2=v:A3=z:GOSUB 3130:var1=A1
In fact, once the kernel is written and documented, you can turn a generic RPN calculator script into specific special purpose code. I had mine so that all variables in the calculator start with O, P and Q. The idea was that you could write messy code outside these letters, and use the calculator as an input device.
And they say girls can't program. Ha. We just do it differently.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
One should realize that the most fundamental numerical algorithms do not change very rapidly. The most common numerical algorithms (sorting, linear algebra, differential equations, etc., both in serial and parallel) have been the subject of intense research by an army of applied mathematicians over the last half-century. All you have to do to take advantage of that work is to call your friendly local numerical library.
Of course, sophisticated 3D graphics methods are still the subject of intense research.
So in sum, I would argue that as far as "serious" numerical methods go, excellent solutions usually exist. (These methods are "open source", indeed open source before the term existed! They are usually published in the scientific literature. The main gains that remain are in "entertainment" applications. Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
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.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
The first PC grass root movement was for OS/2, and a lot of useful things were learnt from this (and the mistakes made).
That IBM "abandoned" OS/2 and the rise of Linux had allowed many OS/2ers to go over to linux. Many freely admit to it.
Some of us stayed, largely because Linux is an entirely different paradigm to the OS/2 - Windows - DOS world we live in. But at least I am doing something by supporting an alternate to Windows.
In OS/2 it is easy to do that. This is because of EXTPROC and REXX. From that, you can write a REXX script for the processor, and feed the language script in as data. Saved many hundreds of hours' work doing it like that.
Maybe you can do that in Linux too - don't know enough about that.
Most good authorities on computer languages says you should learn several languages. This allows you to think more creatively. I know.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
see ya in programmer's heaven...
Similar tricks were used in machines that had drum and delay-line memories, arranging the instructions such that the next one needed would emerge from the magnetic head or piezo reader just as the previous one was finished executing ... often with other instructions belonging to a different "thread" filling the gaps.
In those days you programmed to the bare metal because it was the only way to get anything useful done.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Alan Cooper is widely known as the "Father or Visual Basic", not bill. He (Alan) also wrote a pretty kick ass (for the time) book on usability called "About Face". It's still worth a read today IMHO.
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
January 2002 Dr. Dobbs Journal, page 18: basically some unidentifiable chick could have figured out the secret of the enigma machine much earlier than everyone else, but she wasn't allowed to follow up on her insights. She's called Mrs. BB because they can't think of anything better.
[o]_O
Of course you can do that under linux. IBM Object REXX for Linux or other REXX for Unix.
I'm typing this from a Penn CSE lab which is right down the hall from the room housing some of the remnants of ENIAC. There is a large picture on the wall, in which Betty is featured prominently, and she's been mentioned in almost every undergrad CSE class I've taken here so far.. it's nice to know that her efforts won't go un-noticed by kids like me these days, who grew up in the PC (non-mainframe) age.
While her accomplishments may seem minor compared to those of the modern-day programmers,
Actually her accomplishments seem a hell of a lot more important than those of any contemporary programmers. I know slashdotters tend to have messianic complexes, but come on, show some humility; she represents the generation that created the computer revolution.
I found this on Google. It attributes the quote to Andy Rooney.
I'm readinga good book rigt now about te attempt at the first computer called, "The difference Engine". It'd b Charles Babbage and is prett good.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
In general you can do this under *nix with #!at the top of the file. So if you had a *nix command /usr/bin/rpn your example would translate into:
#!/usr/bin/rpn
b %1
b %2
a
s
Just about every *nix command that accepts a file containing commands as an argument will work this way.
I never did like REXX back when I was using OS/2 and I don't know why. It looks like REXX is an easy language to program with. And really I should have jumped at the chance to use a "real" scripting language versus basic and those hideous dos batch files.
I never heard of "Betty" before today. Having read her obituary I can only think to say thanks for all that she has left of us with that was uniquely her. How many of us will be able to look back at our lives and say we have contributed as much?
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
Unfortunately, it kind of hit a dead-end with many unresolved issues. Now, a great many more women work full-time jobs, but so do men. In fact, the average work-week has grown steady up from 40 hours to 45 or 50. Meanwhile it has grown more and more difficult to financially support a family on one income, but the housework still needs doing and kids need taking care of.
It's true that women tend to make less for the same work as men, but even if that gets equalized, that doesn't solve the bigger problems. Being forced to work 50+ hours a week is hardly "liberation," and certainly not what the feminist movement was hoping to achieve.
Ultimately, both men and women need to work together to liberate ourselves (at least those of us in the bottom 99% economically).
What makes it useful is that you can write a filter or batch processor quickly.
As far as batch processors go, you can write one that has just one command, eg "$#$". Anything that follows $#$ is processed as a sub command, and anything else just passes through unprocessed. You can then use this to produce RTF output (since most lines are unprocessed, and only the values to be substituted get processed).
You can do the same in PERL, but in the DOS/Win/OS/2 world, REXX is the most widely known.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.