Mrs. Lois Haibt

An American Computer Scientist, who is perhaps most famous for being a member of the ten person team that invented FORTRAN, the first successful high level programming language. She joined the FORTRAN team, which was led by John Backus, upon graduation from Vassar College. She was the only female member of the team. She is quoted as saying, "They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills-bridge players, chess players, even women." After graduating from Vassar, where she did well in math and science, she was lured to I.B.M. by a starting salary of $5,100, nearly twice the offer from Bell Laboratories. "They told me it was a job programming computers," she said. "I only had a vague idea what that was. But I figured it must be something interesting and challenging, if they were going to pay me all that money." ?It was the kind of atmosphere where if you couldn?t see what was wrong with your program, you would just turn to the next person,? she recalled. ?No one was worried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her code. We were all just learning together.? She was tasked with writing the computer module that analyzed the flow control from the part of the compiler that collected information about the program to be compiled and calculated (using Monte Carlo simulations) the frequency with which the basic blocks of the program would be executed. She worked for years as a systems analyst and researcher for Yorktown Heights IBM Research Laboratory, where her work included working on visualization of program structure using a program she developed to draw multilevel flow charts and in later years, she worked in the analysis of Petri Nets and generating programs from them.