Betty Holberton
Author of the Sort-Merge Generator
ENIAC, the first generator program, and readable console design
Rating
86Impact score
Domains
Early programmingSortingHuman factors
Scouting report
ENIAC programmer who went on to write the sort-merge generator for UNIVAC, an early instance of a program that writes a program. She argued for the UNIVAC console being grey rather than black on human-factors grounds, worked on the C-10 instruction set, and later contributed to the COBOL and FORTRAN standards.
Curator’s note
Wrote code that wrote code, in 1951, on a machine with mercury memory.
Sources
- 01Betty Holberton en.wikipedia.org
- 02ENIAC programmers en.wikipedia.org