Rock on! Retired IBM programmer Frances E. Allen was the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award, worth $100,000. When she joined IBM in 1957, the company was trying to recruit women on college campuses by circulating a brochure called “My Fair Ladies.” She joined right after John Backus’ team had just developed Fortran. Allen developed techniques to optimize the performance of compilers, which translate programming languages into binary code. Says Business Week:
The point of Fortran was to develop a system that could operate a computer just as efficiently as previous “hand-coded” approaches directly assembled by programmers. Allen recalled Wednesday that her task at IBM was to replicate the achievement on multiple kinds of computers.
“I had the good fortune to work on one big project on good machines after another,” she said.
Her work led her into varied assignments, including writing intelligence analysis software for the National Security Agency. More recently she helped design software for IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer.
Backus got his own Turing Award in 1977, but it’s taken 40 years for a woman to receive the honor:
Allen called it “high time for a woman,” though she quickly added: “That’s not why I got it.”