Adele Goldstine
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The ENIAC manual; training its first programmers
- Nationality
- American
She wrote the ENIAC manual — nearly 550 pages that were the machine's only documentation, and therefore the first programming manual ever written.
Adele Katz was born in New York in 1920 and read mathematics at Hunter College and the University of Michigan before joining the Moore School in Philadelphia as an instructor. Her job was to train the women who calculated artillery tables by hand — a role whose actual job title at the time was computer. When ENIAC was built, she recruited and trained six of them as the machine's first programmers.
In 1946 she wrote Report on the ENIAC, a technical description walking through every panel, cable and switch in the machine. There was nothing else to read: anyone who wanted ENIAC to do something read her book. She was married to Herman Goldstine, the Army's liaison officer on the project, a fact that for decades got listed first in accounts of her career.
In 1947–48 she worked with Nick Metropolis and John von Neumann on rebuilding ENIAC to read instructions from its function tables rather than from cabling — the conversion that gave the machine something resembling a stored program. She also consulted for Los Alamos. She died of cancer in 1964, aged 43.