| | **Betty Snyder** — born **Frances Elizabeth Snyder** (7 March 1917 – 8 December 2001), later **Holberton** — was an American mathematician, one of the six original ENIAC programmers, and arguably the one who stayed closest to the cutting edge for longest: she invented the **breakpoint**, helped write **COBOL**, and spent decades shaping computing standards. |
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| | ## Life |
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| | Snyder studied journalism at the University of Pennsylvania — on her first day, a professor told her journalism was no career for a woman and she would do better wasting her time learning something else; she switched to mathematics. She was working as a human computer for the Army when the call went out for six women to program a machine that didn't yet have a name anyone knew: ENIAC. |
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| | ## ENIAC and after |
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| - | On ENIAC she was known for keeping track of the machine's thousands of interdependent settings — the discipline that would make her indispensable on later machines. When the war ended she joined Mauchly and Eckert's company, becoming a lead programmer on **UNIVAC I** under **Grace Hopper**'s group — where she designed the **C-10 instruction set** and wrote the first **sort-merge generator**, the ancestor of every sorting utility since. |
| + | On ENIAC she was known for keeping track of the machine's thousands of interdependent settings — the discipline that would make her indispensable on later machines. When the war ended she joined Mauchly and Eckert's company, becoming a lead programmer on **[[UNIVAC_I|UNIVAC I]]** under **[[Grace_Hopper|Grace Hopper]]**'s group — where she designed the **C-10 instruction set** and wrote the first **sort-merge generator**, the ancestor of every sorting utility since. |
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| | Her most famous single contribution is the **breakpoint**: at her urging, UNIVAC was built with the ability to halt on a chosen instruction so a programmer could inspect the machine's state — the debugging mechanism every developer still uses. She was a key force in the development of **COBOL** (1959) and spent her career pushing for machine-independent languages and national computing standards at the National Bureau of Standards. |
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| | ## Legacy |
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| | - **IEEE Computer Pioneer Award** (1997) — the citation credits the breakpoint and her sort-merge work. |
| | - **Augusta Ada Lovelace Award** (1997) from the Association for Women in Computing — fittingly named for [[Ada Lovelace]]. |
| | - Inducted into the **Women in Technology International Hall of Fame** (1997) with the other five. |
| | - Died in 2001 — the only one of the six whose later career rivaled her ENIAC fame. |
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| | ## See also |
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| | - [[The first programmers]] |
| | - [[History of Programming]] |
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| | [[Category:History]] |
| | [[Category:People]] |
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