"Betty Holberton was a real software pioneer," said Donald E. Knuth, professor emeritus at Stanford University and author of The Art of Computer Programming, the definitive work on the topic.

During an illustrious career, Mrs. Holberton helped develop the UNIVAC computer, and created a program to sort and merge large data files, at the time a toilsome process. She also was a key member of the committee that designed COBOL, a business programming language still in widespread use over 40 years later.

She was one of six young women, skilled in mathematics, who were selected in the 1940s to program ENIAC, the Army's Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC is widely regarded as the world's first all-electronic digital computer.

The young women programmed ENIAC by setting switches and cables inside the 30-ton computer. Mrs. Holberton was known for her facility at finding the best ways to guide computations through the maze of ENIAC. Reportedly her insights often came to her overnight.

After World War II, Mrs. Holberton joined with John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, developers of ENIAC, in the development of UNIVAC.

Mrs. Holbedrton joined the Navy's Applied Math Lab in 1953 as supervisor of advanced programming, and in 1959, served as a crucial member of the committee that created COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language. COBOL was intended as a temporary solution to the problem of handling business data, but is still widely used.

In 1966 Mrs. Holberton joined the National Bureau of Standards and worked there for 20 years. In 1997, she won the prestigious Augusta Ada Lovelace Award of the Association of Women in Computing.