Adele Goldstine - pioneering programmer

I've been doing some reading lately about the women who programmed the ENIAC computer, and was thrilled to learn that these six amazing women were trained by another amazing woman: Adele Goldstine!

Adele Goldstine (December 21, 1920 – November, 1964) earned her masters in mathematics from the University of Michigan, and then went to teach at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. That's important, because that's where the US Army set up their Ballistics Research Laboratory. Adele worked as a mathematics instructor for the women computers tasked with doing the calculations by hand.

That's also where they built the ENIAC computer, the very first programmable, electronic, digital computer, designed to solve large-scale problems -- like ballistic trajectories. Adele trained several of the original six women programmers, who were set loose on the machine to figure out how to program it. Being the first of its kind, no one really knew what it was capable of or how to go about programming it. So these women just figured it out.

Adele wrote the ENIAC Operators Manual (Bookshop/Amazon) based on what they discovered as they taught themselves, enabling more programmers to use the machine throughout the war. At first, each time the ENIAC was used, it had to be programmed from scratch, but eventually Adele figured out how to get it to "save" several key functions, saving the time of having to set it up again fresh.

You can learn more about her life and work in this excellent piece by the Society of Women Engineers.

[Image: Adele and Herman Goldstine. Source: Society of Women Engineers]

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