It wasn’t family and well-wishing friends rushing to Erna Hoover’s house in 1971 right after she had come home from the hospital with her second child. It was a battery of well-heeled, briefcase-toting lawyers who needed her to review important legal paperwork – a patent application Bell Laboratories was filing on Hoover’s behalf.

The Wellesley graduate (with honors) who held a Ph.D. from Yale had used her mathematical skills to create a software program that allowed the national telephone network to evolve from a system of electronic relays which were becoming choked by enormous call volume, to a modern and efficient system capable of managing any amount of calls.

The patent was issued in 1971 and became one of the first software patents event issued.

As a result of this success, Hoover became the first woman supervisor of a technical department at Bell Labs. “When I was hired,” she once said, “the glass ceiling was somewhere between the basement and the sub-basement.”

She worked at the Labs for 32 years focusing on anti-ballistic missile systems and artificial intelligence. She retired in 1987.

In 2008, Hoover was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.