betty holberton frances elizabeth betty holberton march 7 1917 december 8 2001 was one of the six original programmers of eniac the first generalpurpose electronic digital computer and was the inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging early life and education programmers betty jean jennings left and fran bilas right operate the eniacs main control panel the eniac programmers as told by us chief technology officer megan smith problems playing this file see media help holberton was born frances elizabeth snyder in philadelphia pennsylvania in 1917 on her first day of classes at the university of pennsylvania holbertons math professor asked her if she wouldnt be better off at home raising children career betty holberton right foreground programming the eniac computer in philadelphia pennsylvania brl building 328 1940s1950s during world war ii while the men were fighting the army needed the women to compute ballistics trajectories holberton was hired by the moore school of engineering to work as a computor and was soon chosen to be one of the six women to program the eniac classified as subprofessionals holberton along with kay mcnulty marlyn wescoff ruth lichterman betty jean jennings and fran bilas programmed the eniac to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories electronically for the ballistic research laboratory brl us army their work on eniac earned each of them a place in the women in technology international hall of fame during her time working on eniac she had many productive ideas that came to her overnight leading other programmers to jokingly state that she solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake 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 univacs black exterior with the graybeige tone that came to be the universal color of computers she 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 navys applied math lab in maryland where she stayed until 1966 later as an employee of the national bureau of standards she was very active in the first two revisions of the fortran language standard fortran 77 and fortran 90 death she died on december 8 2001 in rockville maryland aged 84 due to heart disease diabetes and complications from a stroke she had suffered several years before awards 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 received the ieee computer pioneer award from the ieee computer society for developing the sortmerge generator which according to ieee 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 legacy holberton school a projectbased school for software engineers based in san francisco was founded in her honor in 2015 timeline of women in science programmed to succeed betty holberton archived from the original on 20080109 retrieved 20060307cs1 maint bot originalurl status unknown link at the association for women in computing website computer pioneer betty holberton dies at 84 government computer news january 5 2002 two oral history interviews with frances e holberton charles babbage institute university of minnesota minneapolis univac conference 1718 may 1990 as well as interview by james baker ross 14 april 1983 in the latter holberton discusses her education from 1940 through the 1960s and her experiences in the computing field these include work with the eckertmauchly computer corporation david taylor model basin and the national bureau of standards she discusses her perceptions of cooperation and competition between members of these organizations and the difficulties she encountered as a woman she recounts her work on the eniac and larc computers her design of operating systems and her applications programming frances e holberton papers circa 1950s1980s charles babbage institute university of minnesota stanley autumn 1933 chapter 5 daughters of the enchantress of numbers and grandma cobol mothers and daughters of invention notes for a revised history of technology the scarecrow press inc p460 isbn0813521971 ceruzzi paul e 2003 chapter 3 the early history of software 19521968 a history of modern computing mit press pp8990 isbn0262532034 norberg arthur 2002 part 4 software as labor process history of computing software issues springer p159 isbn3540426647 vtetimelines of computingcomputing before 1950 19501979 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s softwareopensource software 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s programming languages hypertext technology operating systems dos family windows linux virtualization development malware computer science artificial intelligence quantum computing internet web browsers internet conflicts men in computing charles babbage john backus george boole vint cerf john cocke stephen cook j presper eckert david a huffman bob kahn brian kernighan andrew koenig donald knuth joseph kruskal douglas mcilroy john von neumann dennis ritchie guido van rossum bjarne stroustrup ken thompson linus torvalds alan turing paul vixie larry wall stephen wolfram steve wozniak women in computing kathleen antonelli jean bartik adele goldstine lois haibt betty holberton ada lovelace margaret hamilton grace hopper nancy leveson marlyn meltzer klara dan von neumann frances spence ruth teitelbaum 