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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.""
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.
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.
What languages have YOU designed?
There is a nice picture a her here. just if anyone is interested...
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"
Perhaps she made some obscure discovery that tomorrow will change the way we think about computers.
Actually she did. We know that software has not progressed as far as hardware. Most of it's relative progress was made by the original ENIAC TEAM. And Betty more than anybody else on that team wanting something that most of modern day programers are also hoping for... make computers fun, user fiendly and a good part of our daily life.
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. :-(
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.