Betty Holberton

Programmer of the ENIAC

• Born: March 7, 1917
• Place of Birth: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: December 8, 2001
• Place of Death: Rockville, Maryland

• Primary Company/Organization: Remington Rand

Introduction

Betty Holberton was an early computer programmer and pioneer in the fields of computer science and information technology. During World War II, the US Army chose Holberton and five other women to program the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. The ENIAC programmers worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Although best known for her work on the ENIAC, Holberton also had several notable postwar career achievements, including designing the control console and instruction code for the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), one of the earliest commercial computers, produced by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly at Remington Rand. She is also renowned for her development of the sort-merge generator and her role in the development of the COBOL and FORTRAN computer programming languages.

Early Life

Betty Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder on March 7, 1917, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She expressed an early aptitude for mathematics, a difficult field for women to enter at the time. She endured taunts at school for being left-handed and cross-eyed. Holberton attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she initially decided to pursue her early love of mathematics. She quickly became discouraged, however, when on her first day of classes one of her mathematics professors suggested that she return home, get married, and start a family, because mathematics was a traditionally male field. She was determined to complete her higher education but switched to the field of journalism, one of the few majors women were allowed to pursue. She was also intrigued by the field's opportunities for travel.

Life's Work

Holberton finally had a chance to use her mathematical skills professionally after the United States entered World War II in 1941. One of the many women employed by the military due to wartime shortages of male labor, she was assigned to calculate ballistics trajectories manually, a long and laborious mathematical task. The women assigned to this task were called "computers." Although the government and military viewed them as primarily clerical workers, they quickly demonstrated the value of their mathematical abilities, and the role allowed Holberton to enter the developing field of computer programming.

Holberton began her career at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, working on the development of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. When the Army expressed interest in the ENIAC's potential to perform the mathematical calculation of ballistics-firing trajectories, primarily artillery shells, at a higher rate of speed than could be accomplished manually, Holberton worked at the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The Army selected her and five others—Betty Jean Jennings (later Jean Bartik), Kathleen "Kay" McNulty (later Mauchly, then Antonelli), Marlyn Wescoff (later Meltzer), Ruth Lichterman (later Teitelbaum), and Frances Bilas (later Spence)—to be the original ENIAC programmers. The six were chosen based on their mathematical abilities and superior job performance. The group began its training on old punch-card equipment provided by International Business Machines (IBM), which was similar to what would be used with the ENIAC.

The ENIAC was a large machine weighing thirty tons that had to be housed in a room measuring thirty feet by fifty feet. The programmers were largely self-taught, initially generating their programs from electrical wiring blueprints in a separate room from the ENIAC because the project was classified. Later, the group gained access to the ENIAC itself in order to implement and test the programs that they had developed. The hardwired programming required the group to set the machine's multitude of linked switches and dials manually, as well as manipulate the heavy black cables in a variety of configurations depending on the calculation to be performed.

ENIAC was functional by 1945 and was successfully demonstrated in February 1946. It reduced the time needed to calculate ballistics flight trajectories from approximately twenty hours to less than a minute, although it debuted too late to help the US war effort in World War II. The military also utilized the ENIAC for the top-secret Manhattan Project, which developed the world's first atomic bomb. The ENIAC's vacuum-tube-based technology could support high-speed digital computing, and the machine came to be recognized as the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.

The programming team went their separate ways after their work on ENIAC, but their work proved to be a pioneering achievement in the development of modern computer programming. The women had faced discrimination in their work, which was considered clerical and nonprofessional, and stories often circulated that they had to clean up after their male colleagues at the end of the workday. They also received little recognition for their work, both at the time and for decades afterward, although they ultimately would be celebrated as computer programming pioneers.

Holberton would remain in the field of computer programming for the rest of her life. After World War II, she found employment with renowned typewriter manufacturer Remington Rand, whose 1950 acquisition of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation—where Holberton worked with owners and fellow ENIAC programmers J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly—marked its entry into the computer industry. Eckert, Mauchly, and Holberton began developing the first Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) for the US Census Bureau but found government funding inadequate for completion. Remington Rand's completed UNIVAC was one of the first mainframe computers sold on the commercial market after its 1951 introduction. Holberton was involved in the development of UNIVAC hardware and software, designing both its control console and its instruction code. UNIVAC could calculate additions in 120 microseconds, multiplications in 1,800 microseconds, and divisions in 3,600 microseconds. It received widespread public attention for its prediction of the 1952 presidential election results, calling the victory for Dwight Eisenhower before the polls had closed.

Holberton assisted Mauchly with the development of the C-10 programming instructions used for the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), which is considered a forerunner of modern programming languages. She also wrote the first statistical analysis program, which the US Census Bureau used for the 1950 Census, and developed the first generative programming system, an application generator known as the sort-merge generator. This system simplified the laborious process of sorting and merging large data files that at the time were stored on reels of magnetic tape, making the use of such files more practical.

Holberton next worked at the US Navy's Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin in Maryland from 1953 to 1966. She was supervisor of advanced programming and was promoted to chief of the Programming Research Branch in 1959. There, she worked with fellow computer programming pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper in the development and standardization of both Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) and FORTRAN, groundbreaking computer programming languages. In 1959, Holberton chaired the committee that developed COBOL, which was introduced in 1960. COBOL was designed to bring computer programming into the business world by allowing computers to describe business data visually. Despite criticisms of its hasty development and inadequacies, which Holberton readily acknowledged, updated versions of COBOL have remained in use since its inception. Hopper credited Holberton for both her computer programming abilities and her influence on Hopper's development of an early compiler, which translated human programming commands into instruction codes that computers could interpret and subsequently perform.

Holberton spent her last several decades of employment at the US National Bureau of Standards, which she had joined in 1966. There, she contributed to the ability of various computers to communicate globally regardless of their manufacturer or brand specifications, a key to later development of the Internet.

Although Holberton and the other female programmers received little recognition at the debut of ENIAC, they have since come to be recognized as pioneers, both as computer programmers and as women in traditionally male fields. The six original female ENIAC programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame on June 5, 1997. Both the ENIAC and the UNIVAC computers are housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Holberton received the 1997 Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing (AWC), the organization's highest award, at a ceremony in Arlington, Virginia. She also received the 1997 Computer Pioneer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her development of the first sort-merge generator and its influence on later developments in the area of data compilation.

Personal Life

Betty Snyder married John Vaughn Holberton in 1950. The couple had two daughters, Priscilla and Pamela. Holberton spent her last years in a nursing home in Rockville, Maryland, where, on December 8, 2001, she died at age eighty-four of complications from heart disease, diabetes, and an earlier stroke. She was survived by her children, two sisters, and a brother.

Bibliography

Ensmenger, Nathan. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge: MIT P, 2010. Print.

"Frances Snyder Holberton." IEEE Computer Society, 2024, www.computer.org/profiles/frances-snyder-holberton. Accessed 14 Oct. 2024.

Hally, Mike. Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age. Washington: Henry, 2005. Print.

Light, Jennifer S. "When Computers Were Women." Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers. Ed. Margaret E. Layne. Reston: Amer. Soc. of Civil Engineers, 2009. 179–210. Print.

McCartney, Scott. ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer. New York: Walker, 1999. Print.

Stern, Nancy B. From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers. Bedford: Digital, 1981. Print.