You may not know who Frances Allen is from the top of your head, but you should. Not only was she the first female IBM colleague, but she was also the first female winner of the prestigious Turing Award. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Allen also pioneered computer composition – the process by which the gadgets we use convert software from the high-language coding languages that humans understand to source code executable by machines.
Allen died on August 4, her 88th birthday, at a nursing home in Schenectady, New York, of Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite all her groundbreaking achievements, Allen initially did not intend to pursue a career in computer science. After earning a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1957, Allen took a job at IBM to pay off her student loans. She taught new IBM employees Fortran, a new type of high-level programming language that would allow engineers to enroll in something easier to understand than binary. While Allen only intended to stay with IBM until her debt was squared, she spent the next 45 years there, retiring in 2002.
Early on, Allen was assigned to work as an IBM liaison for the National Security Agency and worked on the development of Alpha, which IBM describes as “a high-level code-breaking language with the ability to create new alphabets outside the alphabet-defined system.” She managed the compiler optimization team for both the Rispinge en Stretch projects, which resulted in the computer Stretch-Harvest. According to the New York Times, it was the most advanced computer of that time and was created with the intention of intercepting communications from spies all over the world.
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At that time, compilers were not exactly efficient. That meant software could be slow, clunky, more expensive and was envious of errors. Allen and fellow IBM researcher John Cocke published a series of papers describing how people could communicate more efficiently with computers, including the 1972 seminal paper “A catalog of optimizing transformation. ”
This may sound far removed from what modern computing looks like, but in reality, Allen’s work has shaped how we interact. every piece of tech in our lives. Her work can be found in “every app, every website, every video game or communication system, every government or bank computer, every on board computer in a car or plane,” said Graydon Hoare, inventor of the programming language Rust, in Allen’s New York Times obituary. In principle, you can thank Allen for creating the foundation that allows current developers to write an app or website that your smartphone, tablet or computer can understand and execute almost instantly.
On top of her achievements, Allen also played a major role in getting more women to enter computer science. IBM notes that she ‘spent many years as a mentor through IBM’s mentoring program’, and also received several awards for helping women in the field. In addition to being inducted into the International Hall of Fame of Women in Technology, she has also received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award.
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