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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.
"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"
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)