Fran Bilas
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.
Life
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.
ENIAC and after
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.
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.
Legacy
- 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.