One of the most prestigious prizes in computing, the $100,000 Turing Award, <A HREF="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070221/ap_on_hi_te/techbit_turing_award">went to a woman for the first time</A> in the award's 40-year history.

Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM 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.