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FWIW I recently read "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldorf, and it has interesting details that bear on the "1945 Stored Program" entry in your list. Basical

by chubot 8y ago

FWIW I recently read "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldorf, and it has interesting details that bear on the "1945 Stored Program" entry in your list. Basically it said that von Neumann was reporting the work of others in "draft", and he didn't include the people who actually did the work as authors because it was a draft. In other words, it was prematurely circulated without proper attribution. Ironically, I don't remember their names. It may have been Eckert and Mauchly as you list on your page. If anyone wants to know more, e-mail me (address in profile) I will look it up. There was also a patent dispute between von Neumann and the other party, IIRC, and that is why there is no patent. So basically the "von Neumann machine" is probably not a great name. You don't call it that in your page, which is good, but that's how I always thought of the stored program! I believe I was taught that in computer architecture class in college. ---- EDIT: Yes now that I googled, the way the Dream Machine portrayed it, Eckert and Mauchly had a stronger claim to inventing the stored program than is portrayed on your page. You did say von Neumann "described" the stored program rather than invented it, and that's the issue that is discussed at some length in the book. Some snippets here: https://books.google.com/books?id=7HpQAAAAMAAJ&dq=dream+machine+waldorf&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=von+neumann+patent https://books.google.com/books?id=7HpQAAAAMAAJ&dq=dream+mach...

aasasd 8y ago
Wikipedia has a paragraph on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the... Apparently there was a whole team of people participating in the design: > some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent. The elegiac Stigler's law of eponymy is mentioned there: “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”

by chubot 8y ago

aasasd 8y ago

Wikipedia has a paragraph on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the... Apparently there was a whole team of people participating in the design: > some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent. The elegiac Stigler's law of eponymy is mentioned there: “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”