Frances Elizabeth Holberton would have turned 107 today!

She was a mathematician and programmer most known for being part of the small team of women who programmed the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer.

However, she also used a deck of playing cards to develop the decision tree for the binary sort function!! I think I learned this via the BaseCS Podcast years ago, and if memory serves, she applied it to analyzing one of the U.S. censuses.

According to her wikipedia page, Betty was a night owl and they joked that she "solved more problems in her sleep than other people did awake"!

Here are a few other impressive things she did, during a time when women were considered "subprofessionals" to their male counterparts 🙄:

• Participated in the development of the the C-10 Instruction set for BINAC
• Participated in the development of early standards for both COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages
• Helped develop the UNIVAC (another computer)

Happy birthday, Betty! Thank you for facing a mountain of challenges and paving the way 👩🏻‍💻