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Herman Goldstine, ENIAC Developer, Dies at Age 90
CodeFixer writes "Herman Goldstine, who as a mathematician working at the Ballistic Research Lab convinced the US Army to fund the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC, has died at the age of 90. His obituary can be found at the New York Times and descriptions of his involvement in the development of the ENIAC can be found at the Army Research Laboratory."
Herman Goldstine, who as a mathematician working at the Ballistic Research Lab convinced the US Army to fund the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC, has died at the age of 90.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Goodbye World
Hey - he was 90. We should all be so lucky. Life causes death.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Quotes about the ENIAC:
"Thus ended the life of the once glorious pioneer in the field of digital computation"
"It's death was a natural one--it had served its purpose."
As quoted from: The ENIAC Story
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
The Brainiac who made Eniac had a Cardiac.
A great man who paved the way for many other great men and women. as a side note, It's interesting how so much technology, such as ENIAC, get started as tools of war.
IBM also supplied many armies with the punch-card machines/readers used to keep track of war records. the armies included the US army and the German army.
How long will you have to live to see as much change as this guy saw?
The ENIAC Java Applet and the ENIAC on a chip project
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Use http://www.bugmenot.com/ for soul-sucking registration-free login/pass.
EDVAC and ENIAC
ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first all-electronic computer designed to be Turing-complete, capable of being reprogrammed by rewiring to solve a full range of computing problems. It was preceded in 1941 by the fully tape-programmable but still mechanical Z3 designed by Konrad Zuse and by the all-electronic rewire to reprogram but not fully general purpose British Colossus computer. Both ENIAC and Colossus used thermionic valves, that is, vacuum tubes, while Z3 used mechanical relays. The requirement to rewire to reprogram ENIAC was removed in 1948.
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was the first stored program computer ever designed. This design became the standard architecture for most modern computers. The design for the EDVAC is therefore considered a major milestone in the history of computer evolution. While the EDVAC was the first stored program computer to be designed three other stored program computers were built before the EDVAC finally became operational. (the British Small-Scale Experimental Machine at Manchester University, the EDSAC at Cambridge University, and the Australian CSIR Mk I).
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Not to denegrate Goldstine's contributions, they were important but he was really more of a project manager and made sure the defense department kept the money flowing. Presper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly were the principle designers of the machine.
The power of modern communication - /. hears about it 12 days after his death.. :S
Here's a better write-up..
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Computer Developer Herman Goldstine Dies
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page B07
Herman H. Goldstine, 90, a mathematician who played a key role in early development of the electronic digital computer during World War II, died June 16 at a retirement community in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He had Parkinson's disease.
Dr. Goldstine, who later worked at IBM, wrote "The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann" (1972), a highly readable account of the history of mathematics and the way it influenced the development of computer science.
During World War II, Dr. Goldstine worked for the Army's Ordnance Department, which had an interest in developing faster and more accurate artillery and bombing tables.
Assigned to the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md., he began persuading Army officials to invest money in a computer project underway at the University of Pennsylvania engineering school. Dr. Goldstine became the Army's liaison to the project, which was being led by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
The result, presented Valentine's Day 1946, was ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
It was the first electronic digital computer and an unwieldy device -- 18,000 vacuum tubes, filling a room 30 feet by 50 feet and using 150 kilowatts of power. "It was like fighting the Battle of the Bulge to keep it running daily," Dr. Goldstine later said.
The ENIAC could store 20 numbers of 10 digits each in its electronic memory and was a milestone in general-purpose computing. It impressed many at the time by performing rapid digital processing.
Besides his supervisory role, Dr. Goldstine was credited with some of the mathematical underpinnings of the ENIAC. He also said he had a major role in bringing Johnny von Neumann to the ENIAC project after seeing him one day in 1944 at the Aberdeen train station and persuading the math giant to visit Penn.
At the time, von Neumann was attending a scientific advisory committee meeting at the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. He was intrigued by high-speed devices that would help with his work on the atom bomb at Los Alamos, N.M. Many of the difficult calculations for the first atom bomb were made with electronic calculators that were essentially office machines.
"Fortunately for me, von Neumann was a warm, friendly person who did his best to make people feel relaxed in his presence," Mr. Goldstine wrote in his 1972 book.
"The conversation soon turned to my work," he wrote. "When it became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the development of an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second, the whole atmosphere of our conversation changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination of the doctor's degree in mathematics."
Herman Heine Goldstine was a Chicago native and received bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Early in his career, he taught mathematics at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.
In 1941, he married Adele Katz, who helped program the ENIAC and wrote an operating manual for it. She died in 1964.
Survivors include his wife, Ellen Watson Goldstine, whom he married in 1966, of Bryn Mawr; two children from his first marriage; and four grandchildren.
After his Army work, Dr. Goldstine worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., helping create a stored-program machine that became the model for the early IBM computers.
He worked at IBM from 1958 to 1984, serving as director of mathematical sciences in research, director of scientific development for the data processing division and consultant to the research director.
In retirement, he spent 13 years as execut
Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program". In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.
See here.
You still can. It is called basic research. Like the Eniac, many things being done right now will seem to have minor signifigance for a long time, then they become VERY important. The guys playing around with quantum mechanics in the 1920's changed the world, but not right away. Kary Mullis' work in the early 80's made all modern DNA tools possible and enabled something whose effect on society is still unknown.
The NY Times story doesn't mention Macauly and Eckert at all. If you read the book "Eniac", they developed the ideas to make the first computer and Goldstein was a facilitator for funding, helping out with some of the theoretical background. It's strange they weren't mentioned in the article.
My dad worked with the ENIAC, and from his recollections to me, I can tell you that the people involved with that machine created nearly everything we now take for granted in software development (or wish we had, for those of us at shoddy development houses). We owe our lives to these guys. As the inventors of computers and computer science pass, let's not forget the ways they did it (i.e. check the code BEFORE it goes in the computer), and let's not doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes they tried so hard to help us avoid.
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Or, put another way, "NCR set U.S. up the bombe."