Adele Goldstine

Adele Goldstine (; December 21, 1920 – November 1964) was an American mathematician and computer programmer. She wrote the manual for the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC. Through her programming work, she was instrumental in converting the ENIAC from a computer that required reprogramming each time it was used to one capable of performing a set of fifty stored instructions.

Early life and education Goldstine was born in New York City on December 21, 1920, to Yiddish-speaking Jewish parents. Goldstine 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 aged 22. The job of computer was critical to the war effort, and women were regarded as capable of doing the work more rapidly and accurately than men. By 1943, and for the balance of World War II, essentially all computers were women as were many of their direct supervisors.

After Kay McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman learned to understand the mechanics of the ENIAC, Goldstine was responsible for writing the Operators Manual for the ENIAC. Reconfiguring the machine to solve a different problem involved physically plugging and unplugging wires on the machine; it was called "setting-up," as the modern terminology of "program" had not yet come into use.

In 1946, Goldstine worked alongside Bartik and Dick Clippinger within programming sessions with a goal to successfully modify Clippinger's stored program to the ENIAC. John von Neumann, a consultant, was involved as well to save work for the programmers from needing to repeatedly plug and unplug patch cables in testing. Jean Bartik mentions Goldstine as her top three programming partners, the other two being Betty Holberton and Art Gehring. These programmers (Goldstine, Holberton, and Gehring) worked together on the Taub program, the program for physicist Abraham Taub to calculate numerical values for expressions in equations to ballistics research for the ENIAC.

Death After having two children, in 1953 and 1960, she was diagnosed with cancer in 1962. She died two years later at the age of 43 in 1964.