<< Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, 84, the software pioneer who programmed the groundbreaking ENIAC digital computer for the Army in the 1940s and later helped create the COBOL and FORTRAN languages used to operate the world's computers, died Dec. 8 at the Kingshire Manor assisted-living community in Rockville. She had suffered a stroke and had diabetes.
Late in life, Mrs. Holberton was credited for her efforts to make the language and equipment of programming user-friendly. After World War II, she created an instruction code, called C-10, that allowed for control of the new UNIVAC -- the first general-purpose computer -- by keyboarded commands rather than by dials and switches.
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.
UNIVAC was put to work during the 1950 Census, and it ultimately revolutionized business.
During the rest of her career, spent as a supervisory mathematician at the Navy's David Taylor Model Basin and the National Bureau of Standards, Mrs. Holberton continued to push to make computers easier for ordinary people to use, Kathryn A. Kleiman observed in writings about Mrs. Holberton.
It was Kleiman's research, first as a young programmer and later as a lawyer and documentary-maker, that finally brought Mrs. Holberton recognition and national honors in the 1990s as a pioneer of computer science. Mrs. Holberton appears in a photograph that is part of the UNIVAC exhibit at the National Museum of American History. >>
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Sad news indeed
. We all owe her alot.
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