Betty Holberton

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Lore & Background

Holberton was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917, the third child in a family of eight. She studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, where on her first day a math professor asked if she wouldn't be better off at home raising children. During World War II, she was one of six women selected to program the ENIAC, working initially only with blueprints and wiring diagrams because the machine was classified. Her fellow programmers joked that she 'solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake.' After the war, she worked at Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards, becoming Chief of the Programming Research Branch at the David Taylor Model Basin in 1959. She helped develop the UNIVAC, designing control panels that put the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and persuading engineers to replace the black exterior with the gray-beige tone that became the universal color of computers. She wrote the first statistical analysis package, used for the 1950 US Census, and developed the sort/merge generator. Grace Hopper stated: 'Everybody’s forgotten that she wrote the first program that wrote a program. She wrote that sort-merge generator, and what she did was feed in the specs for the data you were handling and the keys and that sort of thing, and then it generated the sort program for that specific data. That’s the first time to my knowledge that anyone used the computer to write a program.' Holberton used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function and wrote code to employ ten tape drives. She worked with John Mauchly on the C-10 instruction set for BINAC, considered the prototype of all modern programming languages, and participated in early standards for COBOL and FORTRAN with Grace Hopper. Later at the National Bureau of Standards, she was active in the FORTRAN 77 and Fortran 90 revisions. She died on December 8, 2001, in Rockville, Maryland, aged 84, of heart disease, diabetes, and complications from a stroke.

Reader's Guide

Betty Holberton's significance rests on three concrete achievements: inventing breakpoints in debugging, writing the first program that used a computer to write another program (the sort/merge generator), and being one of the six original ENIAC programmers. Her sort/merge generator, which Grace Hopper explicitly identified as the first instance of a program writing a program, used a deck of playing cards to design the binary sort decision tree and coordinated ten tape drives. The IEEE Computer Society later recognized that this work 'inspired the first ideas about compilation.' Her hardware design choices for the UNIVAC—placing the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and changing the color to gray-beige—became industry standards. Despite these contributions, Hopper noted that Holberton never received proper credit. Recognition came in 1997, when she received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award (the only ENIAC programmer to do so), the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, and induction into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. The Holberton School, founded in 2015 in San Francisco, was named in her honor. Her story appears in the documentaries Top Secret Rosies (2010) and The Computers (2013).

Did You Know?

• Holberton used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function in her sort/merge generator.
• She persuaded engineers to change the UNIVAC's color from black to gray-beige, which became the universal color of computers.
• Grace Hopper said Holberton 'never received the credit that she should have' and that 'everybody’s forgotten that she wrote the first program that wrote a program.'
• On her first day of classes at the University of Pennsylvania, a math professor asked if she wouldn't be better off at home raising children.
• She was the only one of the six original ENIAC programmers to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award.

Pioneering a New Computing Era

Frances Elizabeth Holberton was born in Philadelphia in 1917, the third of eight children. She studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania because its curriculum let her travel and because it was one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s. On her first day, a math professor asked if she wouldn't be better off at home raising children. During World War II, she became one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, working from blueprints and wiring diagrams because the project was classified. After the war, she worked at Remington Rand and the National Bureau of Standards. In 1959 she became Chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin. She helped develop the UNIVAC, designing control panels that put the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and persuading engineers to replace the black exterior with gray-beige, which became the universal color of computers. She wrote the first statistical analysis package, used for the 1950 US Census. She worked with John Mauchly on the C-10 instruction set for BINAC, considered the prototype of all modern programming languages, and participated in early standards for COBOL and FORTRAN with Grace Hopper. Later, at the National Bureau of Standards, she was active in the FORTRAN 77 and Fortran 90 revisions.

Inventions That Redefined Programming

Holberton invented breakpoints in computer debugging. She was the first person to write a program to write a program—using a computer to generate code. Her sort/merge generator allowed users to feed in specifications for data and keys, and it generated a sort program for that specific data. Grace Hopper stated: 'Everybody’s forgotten that she wrote the first program that wrote a program. She wrote that sort-merge generator, and what she did was feed in the specs for the data you were handling and the keys and that sort of thing, and then it generated the sort program for that specific data. That’s the first time to my knowledge that anyone used the computer to write a program.' To develop the decision tree for the binary sort function, Holberton used a deck of playing cards. She wrote code to employ a group of ten tape drives to read and write data as needed. During her ENIAC work, she often had productive ideas at night, leading colleagues to joke that she 'solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake.'

Recognition and Lasting Legacy

Holberton received a Department of Commerce Silver Medal for her work on the FORTRAN national standard and development of test routines. In 1997, she was the only woman of the original six ENIAC programmers to receive the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, the highest award from the Association of Women in Computing. That same year, she received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award for developing the sort/merge generator, which 'inspired the first ideas about compilation.' Also in 1997, she was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame along with the other original ENIAC programmers. The Holberton School, a project-based school for software engineers in San Francisco, was founded in her honor in 2015. Two documentaries feature her story: Top Secret Rosies: The Female 'Computers' of WWII (2010) and The Computers (2013), which combines 1940s footage with interviews of the female ENIAC programmers.

A Life Shaped by Curiosity and Resilience

Frances Elizabeth Snyder was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 7, 1917, the third child of John Amos Snyder and Frances J. Morrow in a family of eight children. She studied journalism because its curriculum let her travel and because it was one of the few fields open to women in the 1940s. On her first day at the University of Pennsylvania, a math professor asked if she wouldn't be better off at home raising children. She married John Vaughn Holberton and had two daughters, Pamela and Priscilla. She died on December 8, 2001, in Rockville, Maryland, aged 84, of heart disease, diabetes, and complications from a stroke she had suffered several years before. She was survived by her husband and daughters.