Dr. Herman Heine Goldstine

As a result of the United States' entering World War II, Goldstine left the University of Michigan where he was a professor in July, 1942 to enlist in the Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant and worked as an ordnance mathematician calculating firing tables at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The firing tables were used in battle to find the appropriate elevation and azimuth for aiming artillery, which had a range of several miles. While making some adjustments to the Moore School's differential analyzer, engineer Joseph Chapline suggested Goldstine visit John Mauchly, a physics instructor at the Moore School, who had distributed a memorandum proposing that the calculations could be done thousands of times faster with an electronic computer using vacuum tubes. Mauchly wrote a proposal and in June 1943 he and Goldstine secured funding from the Army for the project. The ENIAC was built in 30 months with 200,000 man hours. The ENIAC was huge, measuring 30 by 60 feet and weighing 30 tons with 18,000 vacuum tubes. The device could only store 20 numbers and took days to program.