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Betty Snyder originally named Francis Elizabeth Snyder was born on March 7, 1917 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Around 1940 she attended college at the University of Pennsylvania and took up journalism because at the time it was one of the few professional fields open to women.
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In 1945 she was chosen by the Moore School of Engineering to works as a 'computor' a short time after 6 women including her were picked to program the ENIAC.
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The ENIAC was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15th, 1946. Betty along with the other 5 women were the only generation of programmers to ever program the ENIAC.
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Once the war was over, Snyder now Holberton began working at the Remington Ran as well as the National Bureau of Standards. Here she worked on the 2 revisions of the FORTRAN. FORTRAN77 and FORTRANN90.
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Holberton was one of the first people to write the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE)as well as the first statistical analysis package which was used for the 1950 U.S. Census.
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In 1951 Holberton joined John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly ENIAC designers, in helping to develop the UNIVAC.
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Holberton was appointed supervisor of advanced programming in a part of the Navy's applied Math Lab in Maryland in 1953.
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In 1959 Holberton became the chief of the Programming Research Branch, Applied Mathematics Laboratory at the David Taylor Model Basin.
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In 1966 she became a member of the COBOL programming language committee.
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Due to her work in programming ENIAC Betty Holberton was inducted to the Women in Technology Hall of Fame along with the 5 other women involved in the programming of ENIAC.
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As a result of Holberton developing the SORT/MERGE generator she received the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award issued by the IEEE Computer Society.
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The last of the awards she received in 1977 consisted of Augusta Ada Lovelace Award. She was the only one out of the 6 original programmers of the ENIAC to receive this award which was considered the highest award given by the Association of Women in Computing.
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Holberton retired from the burea, which is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1983.
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Sadly on December 8, 2001 Holberton passed away due to health issues.
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