Herman Goldstine

Goldstine was a lieutenant acting as liaison between the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen and the Moore School in Philadelphia, responsible for getting the firing tables finished. It was he who pushed the ENIAC contract through in 1943 when his superiors regarded the machine as unbuildable, and he who hired the six women who ended up programming it. His wife Adele Goldstine wrote the machine's manual and trained them.

In the summer of 1944 he was waiting for a train at Aberdeen when John von Neumann walked past. Goldstine mentioned that he was building a machine that would manage more than three hundred multiplications a second, and the tone of the conversation is said to have changed instantly. Von Neumann joined the project, and out of that came the EDVAC report, the 1946 IAS design written with Arthur Burks, and the 1947 Planning and Coding reports in which the flow diagram was invented.

He followed von Neumann to Princeton, later became an IBM Fellow, and in 1972 wrote The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann. It is still the standard account of the period, with the unusual advantage that its author was in the room.