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.""

Picture of the bug

[bstadil]

It was Gace Hopper Look at this site [vt.edu] they have picture of the Bug.

Full info...

[kikta]

See the page on 1945 [computer.org], where it says:

"Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers."

The Origin of Pale Grey Boxes, etc.

[Alien54]

While engineers focused on the technology of computing, Mrs. Holberton lay awake nights thinking about human thought processes, she later told interviewers. - - - She came up with language using mnemonic characters that appealed to logic, such as "a" for add and "b" for bring. She designed control panels that put the numeric keypad next to the keyboard and persuaded engineers to replace the UNIVAC's black exterior with the gray-beige tone that came to be the universal color of computers.

Now we got folks who what their case midnight black.

But given all of the design issues we have seen, it is interesting to note that the human interface problem was being considered from the very beginning.

[Insert your Microsoft insult joke here]

Re:Something to think about.

[MisterBlister]

This may come off sounding like a flame, but I don't intend it to -- I fully support the notion of Open Source software and have released various bits of OSS myself.

Having said that, for OSS to foster the giant leap forward that you suggest would require a large shift in the way people look at and create OSS. The simple truth is that 99.99% of all OSS is just reinvention of closed source software to scratch an itch or for political reasons. This is not the type of environment in which such a leap springs forth.

While Open Source has many benefits, it would take an awful lot for me to agree with your premise that its more well suited than closed source for the type of efficency gain you're looking for. Such leaps are often made by one or very few people, with everyone else following later. Given that, such a leap is just as likely to occur with plain-old closed source as with OSS.

Parrallel processing from the start.

[Alien54]

The Army chose six women, including Mrs. Holberton, to program the ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons and filled a room. The women had to route data and electronic pulses through 3,000 switches, 18,000 vacuum tubes and dozens of cables.

"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.

Re:Loss and Gain

[andres32a]

Perhaps she made some obscure discovery that tomorrow will change the way we think about computers.

Actually she did. We know that software has not progressed as far as hardware. Most of it's relative progress was made by the original ENIAC TEAM. And Betty more than anybody else on that team wanting something that most of modern day programers are also hoping for... make computers fun, user fiendly and a good part of our daily life.

Nope....

[NickFusion]

The folk etymology of "bug" is that, in the early days of electronic computing, an actual insect flew into the innards of the Harvard Mark II, and caused a malfunction (this did happen), and that is where we get the word bug (in the sense of a flaw in the process). It seems however that the word was already in use in that sense in industrial manufacturing circles at the end of the 19th century.

(New Hacker's Dictionary)

Re:Loss and Gain

[Omerna]

One thing I've noticed is almost always another person is noted as having invented the exact thing at the same time, but weren't officially recognized as "first" so they don't get any credit. The first example that comes to mind is the Periodic Table- Mendeleev was credited, but another guy (anyone remember his name? I can't) did the same thing very slightly differently at the same time (I mean invented a table with the elements arranged like this, not an improvement upon it) and gets no credit because Mendeleev was recognized as first!

Anyway, the point is yeah, it would definitely have been invented within a few years (months?) of when it was.

Re:Female Programmers

[Suppafly]

The original computer programmers were all women, because there was the thought at the time that they would be better at working with computers than men since they would be transisting over from typing pools and from working as jobs at telephone operators, all which were seen as womens job. There is also the thought that women were better at math than a lot of men, which is why women that couldn't get accepted into mathematics programs went into the budding computer field where they were more readily accepted.

Re:Picture of the bug

[Teratogen]

I actually met Grace Hopper when I was a Multics programmer for the Air Force at the Pentagon, back in 1982 or 1983. She was shopping at the Walgreens in the Pentagon Concourse. I introduced myself to her and we talked for a bit. I kick myself repeatedly for not getting her to autograph a Cobol printout for me. =)

Re:Female Programmers

[CatherineCornelius]

I don't think it's realistic to attempt to pin the development of memonic programming concepts on one person--the first mnemonic assembler language was probably developed for the EDSAC at Cambridge, England, some time before UNIVAC ran its first program.
Programming ENIAC must have been a challenge, because what you had was basically a set of vacuum tube shift registers and whatnot that had to be wired together for a given purpose using patchboards.

Right down the hall

[r3volve]

I'm typing this from a Penn CSE lab which is right down the hall from the room housing some of the remnants of ENIAC. There is a large picture on the wall, in which Betty is featured prominently, and she's been mentioned in almost every undergrad CSE class I've taken here so far.. it's nice to know that her efforts won't go un-noticed by kids like me these days, who grew up in the PC (non-mainframe) age.