ENIAC's Women Programmers |
Written by Sue Gee | ||||||
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Marlyn MeltzerMarlyn Wescoff Meltzer (1922 – December 7, 2008) graduated from Temple University in 1942 and was hired by the Moore School of Engineering to perform weather calculations, mainly because she knew how to operate an adding machine, before being transferred in 1943 to the the task of computing ballistics trajectories. She resigned from the ENIAC team in 1947 to get married. Ruth Lichterman TeitelbaumRuth Teitelbaum (February 1, 1924 – August 9, 1986) was born in The Bronx, the elder of two children, and the only daughter, of Sarah and Simon Lichterman, Jewish immigrants from Russia. She graduated from Hunter College with a B.Sc. in Mathematics. Along with Marlyn Meltzer, Teitelbaum was part of a special area of the ENIAC project to calculate ballistic trajectory equations using analog technology. They taught themselves and others certain functions of the ENIAC and helped prepare the ballistics software. Ruth Lichterman (crouching) and Marlyn Wescoff (standing) wiring the right side of the ENIAC with a new program. Betty HolbertonBetty Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was born Frances Elizabeth Snyder in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1917, the third of eight children. She studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania because of a desire to travel but she was the only one of the six ENIAC programmers to have an entire career in computer science. During her time working on ENIAC, in which her role was co-lead of the programming project, she had many productive ideas at night-time, leading other programmers to jokingly state that she "solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake." For example, she was responsible for the invention of breakpoints in computer debugging during her time in ENIAC and later was involved in writing the first sort-merge program. Holberton used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function, and wrote the code to employ a group of ten tape drives to read and write data as needed during the process. She also wrote the first statistical analysis package, which was used for the 1950 US Census. After World War II, Holberton worked at Remington Rand, which had acquired the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation after that company ran into financial trouble, where she 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 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. In 1953 she was made a supervisor of advanced programming in a part of the Navy's Applied Math lab in Maryland, becoming its Chief of Programming Research in 1959, and stayed there until 1966. She also participated in the development of early standards for the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages with Grace Hopper. 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") and in 1976 was awarded with a Department of Commerce Silver Medal in recognition of her work on revision of the national standard for FORTRAN and the development of test routines to test compliance. In 1997 Holberton was awarded the Ada Lovelace Medal, the only one of the ENIAC Six to be individually recognised by the ACM for their contributions to computer programming, and in her New York Times obituary, after her sudden death in 1984, Donald Knuth described her as "a real software pioneer".
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Last Updated ( Monday, 28 April 2025 ) |