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Programmed to
Succeed: Betty Holberton
The ENIAC
– the world’s first electronic computer
– weighed 30 tons, filled a 30-by-50-foot
room, and was programmed by women. Come again?
It’s true. Although our heads are filled
with images of computing as a man’s world,
and my history books are filled with pictures of
men as the field’s creative geniuses, during
World War II, Rosie the Riveter was joined in
non-traditional labor by Betty the Programmer
– and also Jean, Marlyn, Ruth, Kay and
Frances. Together, these six women went where no
one – woman or man – had gone before,
using hardware and human logic to tell a vast
machine just what to do.
In March,
I interviewed two of these pioneers for a cable
TV program called, "On the Go with the
AAUW," which will air on Fairfax Cable later
this year. [The AAUW is the American Association
of University Women.] Betty Snyder Holberton and
Jean Bartik were attending a meeting of the
Association of Women in Computing, a national
group that in Arlington, Va. presented Holberton
with the 1997 Augusta Ada Lovelace* Award, its
highest award for excellence. Because
Holberton’s story speaks volumes about women
in computing, I thought I’d relate it this
month.
Betty
Snyder, born during World War I, was very good in
math. Even so, on her first day at the University
of Pennsylvania, her math professor said she
should stay home raising children. Instead, she
studied journalism because its curriculum let her
go far afield. It was also one of the few majors
open to women. A quirk of history opened doors
for Betty when, in World War II, the U.S.
government sought help from women, given that the
men were off fighting and the work viewed
(perhaps because women did it) as clerical.
"Computors," who were
mostly women, performed the massive and tedious
computations that guided ballistics trajectories.
In other words, they used their mathematical
prowess to help the army make its mark on Axis
powers.
Even with
math whizzes working the numbers, the war effort
demanded more speed. By early 1946, Snyder, along
with Jean (Jennings) Bartik, Marlyn
(Wescoff) Meltzer, Ruth (Lichterman) Teitelbaum,
Kay (McNulty) Antonelli, and
Frances (Bilas) Spence, all classed by
the U.S. government as
"subprofessionals," figured out how to
"program" the freshly unveiled ENIAC to
do the job. At first they worked only from wiring
diagrams, viewed as security risks and kept from
the computer room. Once admitted, they sometimes
had to straighten up the mess that engineers left
overnight (some things never change).
Despite
the obstacles, the women succeeded; even the test
run was flawless. Use of the ENIAC cut
calculation time from about 20 hours down to 30
seconds – about half the time of a
projectile’s flight. After the
demonstration, said The Wall Street Journal
last year, "the men went out for a
celebratory dinner. The programmers went
home."
I’m
not sure I could understand how the ENIAC worked,
let alone explain it to you. What I do know is
this: Holberton and her colleagues figured out
how to make it happen with a machine that could
fill a small ballroom, in a world without
Windows, keyboards or CD-ROMs. Reported The
Wall Street Journal, "Running the ENIAC
required setting dozens of dials and plugging a
ganglia of heavy black cables into the face of
the machine, a different configuration for every
problem."
In short,
it was just yards and yards of intricately linked
on-off switches, about 18,000 vacuum tubes, and
them. Yet, in textbooks, these brainy women are
merely lumped in a nameless group, a footnote in
the shadow of the equally brilliant and fully
credited men who created the machine itself.
Live
Wire is vexed. Even the stodgy Wall
Street Journal reported that the first
programmers’ legacy "is confined mainly
to Movietone footage and sepia photos –
women standing alongside the machine, as if
modeling a Frigidaire." Why is that? In
part, hardware until recently stole the thunder
in computing. Also in part, three of the women
married ENIAC engineers, "making them,"
as the Journal pointed out, "wives first in
the eyes of the history makers."
But the
feisty members of the First Programmers’
Club didn’t let that stop them. Betty Snyder
Holberton enjoyed an extremely influential career
– she helped develop the UNIVAC (the first
commercially available computer), and worked at
Remington Rand, the Applied Mathematics
Laboratory, the David Taylor Model Basin, and the
National Bureau of Standards. Holberton shaped
UNIVAC hardware and was responsible for much of
the first model’s software, which the U.S.
Census bureau used to process 1950 data. Her work
pointed the way for Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
to develop the earliest compiler – a way of
translating programming commands from the
high-level languages we use to instructions that
machines can understand. Hopper, by the way,
described Holberton as being the best programmer
she had ever known.
Holberton
also helped to design and standardize the COBOL
and FORTRAN languages, which may sound Greek to
you but actually represent two critically
important programming languages. Her work at the
standards bureau helped to ensure that computers
could communicate with one another worldwide,
regardless of any one manufacturer’s
dictates.
You can
visit the retired ENIAC at the Smithsonian. Betty
Holberton and Jean Bartik, however, are still
going strong – and so is their legacy. In
our interviews, these outspoken women stressed
the importance of the life of the mind. Their
confidence in their intellect, in the face of
discouraging discrimination, helped them to
succeed and to put their stamp on the information
age. At a time when we worry more than ever about
how girls fare in math and computing, we can tell
them the story of the first programmers, valuable
models of spirit, determination and drive.
* Lovelace, the daughter of George, Lord
Byron, was a skilled mathematician who in the
first half of the 19th
century developed the basic ideas of programming.
Note: The author interviewed Holberton on
camera, in an AAUW
"Women on the Go" episode
aired on Fairfax Cable, Fairfax VA in October
1997.
Copyright 1997 Rachel K. Adelson
Rachel Adelson’s Live
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