| | **Fran Bilas** — born **Frances Elizabeth Bilas** (2 March 1922 – 18 July 2012), later **Spence** — was an American mathematician and one of the six original programmers of ENIAC. |
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| | ## Life |
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| | Bilas earned a mathematics degree from **Chestnut Hill College** in 1942 and went straight into the Army's human-computer corps computing firing tables in Philadelphia — bored by it, like everyone, until the 1945 call went out for volunteers for a classified machine. She later completed a master's in mathematics at Temple University. |
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| | ## ENIAC and after |
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| | On ENIAC, Bilas created the machine's **first sort routine** and its **first program-check mechanisms** — the beginnings of what we'd now call validation and automated testing. When a program failed, her checks were how you found out *where*. She was also one of the two who operated ENIAC through its celebrated public demonstration for the press in **February 1946**. |
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| - | She married an Army engineer in 1947 — which ended her federal computing work — and moved on to programming for **Mauchly's company** on BINAC and UNIVAC-era projects, then lived the next several decades largely out of the field's spotlight. She died in 2012 at ninety. |
| + | She married an Army engineer in 1947 — which ended her federal computing work — and moved on to programming for **Mauchly's company** on BINAC and [[UNIVAC_I|UNIVAC]]-era projects, then lived the next several decades largely out of the field's spotlight. She died in 2012 at ninety. |
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| | ## Legacy |
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| | - Inducted into the **Women in Technology International Hall of Fame** (1997) with the other five. |
| | - The "program check" idea she pioneered — the machine catching its own errors — is now so fundamental it is invisible, which is exactly the measure of a foundational invention. |
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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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