Full Name Adele Katz Died November 1964 Name Adele Goldstine | Occupation Computer programmer Nationality American Education University of Chicago | |
Born December 21, 1920 New York City, NY Books Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer Eniac Technical Manual | ||
Adele Goldstine (née Katz; December 21, 1920 – November, 1964) was an American computer programmer. She wrote the complete technical description for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her work programming the computer, she was also an instrumental player in converting the ENIAC from a computer that needed to be reprogrammed each time it was used to one that was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions.
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Early life and education
Goldstine was born in New York City on December 21, 1920, to Jewish parents. She attended Hunter College High School, then Hunter College. After receiving her B.A, she attended the University of Michigan, where she earned a master's in mathematics. At Michigan, she met Herman Goldstine, the military liaison and administrator for the construction of the ENIAC, and the two were married in 1941.
Work on ENIAC
As a teacher of mathematics for the women "computers" at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Goldstine also trained some of the six women who were the original programmers of ENIAC to perform hand calculations of the firing table trajectory. She wrote the Operators Manual for the ENIAC after the six women (Kay McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman) trained themselves to program the ENIAC using its logical and electrical block diagram. During this time, programming the machine meant moving dials and cables manually.
In 1946 Goldstine sat in on programming sessions with Bartik and Dick Clippinger to implement Clippinger's stored program modification to the ENIAC. John von Neumann was a consultant on the selection of the instruction set implemented. This solved the problem of the programmers having to unplug and replug patch cables for every program the machine was to run; instead the program was entered on the three function tables, which had previously been used only for storage of a trajectory's drag function. ENIAC programmer Jean Bartik called Goldstine one of her three great programming partners along with Betty Holberton and Art Gehring. They worked together to program the Taub program for the ENIAC.
Post-war years
After the war, Goldstine continued her programming work with von Neumann at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she devised problems for ENIAC to process. She had two children, born in 1952 and 1959. She was diagnosed with cancer in 1962 and died two years later at the age of 43 in 1964.