First Woman Honored With Turing Award

Frances E. Allen, former IBM programmer, is the first woman ever to win the prestigious $100,000 Turing Award, the first time in the 40 year history of the award that a woman has won the award.

Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another. This process is required to turn programming code into the binary zeros and ones actually read by a computer's colossal array of minuscule switches.

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