Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton was one
of the six original programmers of ENIAC,
the first general-purpose electronic digital
computer.
Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder
in Philadelphia in 1917. On her first day
of classes at the University of Pennsylvania,
Holberton's math professor asked her if she
wouldn't be better off at home raising children.
Instead, Holberton decided to study journalism,
because its curriculum let her travel far
afield. Journalism was also one of the few
fields open to women as a career in the 1940s.
After World War II, Holberton worked at Remington
Rand and the National Bureau of Standards.
She was the Chief of the Programming Research
Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at
the David Taylor Model Basin in 1959. She
helped to develop the UNIVAC, designing control
panels that put the numeric keypad next to
the keyboard and persuading engineers to replace
the Univac's black exterior with the gray-beige
tone that came to be the universal color of
computers. She was one of those who wrote
the first generative programming system, and
wrote the first statistical analysis package,
which was used for the 1950 US Census.
In 1953 she was made a supervisor of advanced
programming in a part of the Navy’s Applied
Math lab in Maryland, where she stayed until
1966. Holberton worked with John Mauchly to
develop the C-10 instruction set for BINAC,
which is considered to be the prototype of
all modern programming languages. She also
participated in the development of early standards
for the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages
with Grace Hopper. Her work with COBOL was
important in that despite being updated and
revised multiple times since, COBOL is still
used today. Later, as an employee of the National
Bureau of Standards, she was very active in
the first two revisions of the Fortran language
standard.
She died on December 8, 2001 in Rockville,
Maryland, due to heart disease, diabetes,
and complications from a stroke she had suffered
several years before. Betty Holberton was
survived by her husband John Vaughn Holberton
and her daughters Pamela and Priscilla.
In 1997 she was the only woman of the original
six who programmed the ENIAC to receive the
Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the highest award
given by the Association of Women in Computing.
Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women
in Technology International Hall of Fame,
along with the other original ENIAC programmers.
Holberton School, a project-based school for
software engineers based in San Francisco,
was founded in her honor in 2015.
