Judith A. Clapp (born 1930) is a computer scientist who began her career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently moved to the Lincoln Laboratory and then to MITRE, where she was a leader in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) military project, including the development of the SAGE computer.
She received her bachelor's degree in math and physics in 1951 from Smith College and her master's degree in applied science (which she described as the closest match to computer science available at the time) in 1952 from Radcliffe College, then a women's affiliate of Harvard University.
[1][2] After graduating from Radcliffe Clapp began work at MIT, the only woman among the early programmers of the Whirlwind I, the first real-time computer.
The Whirlwind, a vacuum tube computer, had originally been commissioned by the United States Navy but was subsequently financed by the Air Force for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) project.
[1][2][3] Clapp's work is regarded as important groundwork for the development of software engineering as a discipline.