10 ms·

> von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture Well, he actually described an already existing desi

by Rochus 6y ago

> von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture Well, he actually described an already existing design by Eckert and Mauchly under his name and this paper was illegally disclosed. For the ones interested in this and other fascinating stories about ENIAC, here is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Computer/dp/0802713483; https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu... worth reading is also the review by Jean Bartik (here https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/re...) who was there and witnessed everything firsthand.

djmips 6y ago
True but on the other hand, he kind of made computers 'open source'
- Rochus 6y ago
  > he kind of made computers 'open source' The only "positive" (depeding on perspective) effect of his illegal and morally questionable action was that the patent was declared null and void due to the novelty-damaging effect of his report, among other issues supporting this outcome. The computers however did not become more "open source" because of this, just cheaper.
  - amilios 6y ago
    Still a semi-positive outcome no? Computers becoming cheaper?
    - masswerk 6y ago
      J. Presper Eckert (the Eckert in "Eckert & Mauchly") in his oral history interview [1], p.46f: > "Originally we called ENIAC the "MANIAC" when it didn't work right. And later they borrowed that name for some other actual machine. But if you worked for von Neumann on the MANIAC, then if you invented something it belonged to you. Well, on some relatively short notice, like it might have been a week, or a month, or something, a short time before the deadlines hit, von Neumann went down and published all that stuff. All the reports of the engineers went to the Library of Congress which put a bar on any patents being obtained by any of his employees. And when they complained about it to him, he just said, "Well, that's tough; that's the way I think; that stuff should be in the public domain." Now there is a perfectly obvious reason for this. He was consulting with people like IBM. If the things weren't patented that would be a problem for IBM. The idea was he was selling ideas to other people...if it wasn't covered by patents, he would have been selling something they couldn't use. They would have come back and said, now, "what kind of a consultant are you, coming up with new ideas which are already patented by others and we can't use them." But if these ideas could come under the public domain, then he could go around and sell them to people. That was his game." [1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert (1977): https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275
      - adrian_b 6y ago
        For the humanity, the publication of the von Neumann report was certainly a very positive thing because it launched a large number of research projects with the purpose of building electronic computers, both in USA and in many other countries. There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower. Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly. Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer. Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951. If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later. I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al. It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused. Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else. The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply. Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him. Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).
        adrian_b 6y ago
        I want to add that the fast evolution of computers caused by the publication of the von Neumann report and the lack of "IP protection" is paralleled by the fast evolution of semiconductor devices after the discovery of the transistor, which was also caused by the lack of "IP protection" in the modern sense. Even if the transistors have been patented, the patents have been licensed to anyone for negligible fees or even for free (e.g. for hearing aids). If the essential transistor patents had been used like worthless patents are used today in preventing competition, the history of the computer and electronics industries would have been very different, with progress delayed by decades. So both the publication of the von Neumann report and the generous handling of the transistor patents have been very influential in shaping the word of today, while many inventions where the inventors clinged to the patents have been either doomed or they began to be used only after the patents have expired, more than 20 years later.
  - eru 6y ago
    Declaring a patent null and void seems like a positive outcome. Patents are legally enforced monopolies after all.
    - Rochus 6y ago
      So the end justifies all means? Consultants and employees who reveal trade secrets to sabotage patents are heroes in your eyes, not criminals?
smaddox 6y ago
Wow... How is this not more well known? It's not like von Neumann doesn't have plenty of other important contributions to his name.
- kalium-xyz 6y ago
  Most people who have a lot of things named after then wanted to have a lot of things named after them. Consider: why is more named after von Neumann then Erdos?
  - eru 6y ago
    Compared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Paul_Erd%C5%91s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pau... Seems more or less a tie to me. [0] Especially compared to this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car... [0] Actually, it's not a tie: If you add the entries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Erd%C5%91s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er... you get a clear winner.
    - gcanyon 6y ago
      There's a large number of things named after Euler as well -- so many that sometimes things are named after the first person to prove them after Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo...
- masswerk 6y ago
  Have a look the oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert, it's a long lasting controversy: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh013jpe.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...
ducktective 6y ago
How come it's known as "von Neumann" architecture?
- jonnybgood 6y ago
  Stigler's law of eponymy?
- madhadron 6y ago
  So a little bit longer version of the story: Eckert and Mauchly had designed the architecture. Herman Goldstine, the military liaison of the ENIAC project, and something of a social climber, sought out von Neumann to see if he was interested. von Neumann was, and came to a lot of design meetings and made contributions about what the instruction set should be. Then when he was heading out to Los Alamos on a trip, he had some downtime during travel and wrote up the design for the group. Goldstine typed it up and circulated it with just von Neumann's name on it. It is a point of discredit to von Neumann that he did not disavow the naming of the architecture. Funnily, Goldstine's wife was one of the early programmers and well respected in that area. Goldstine himself made no significant contributions to computing.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  The name "von Neumann" is rightly applied to this, because von Neumann was the first who has written a complete and consistent description of this architecture, so that anybody could understand it and build computers based on this architecture. The Eckert group had some rather vague ideas about the architecture of their future computer, the successor of ENIAC, and those ideas certainly included some kind of stored program (not necessarily stored in the same memory as the data; stored programs were not new, as they were common in mechanical or electromechanical computers). However the Eckert group was secretive, because they hoped to start after the war their own company to make computers and become rich, so it is not known for sure how much von Neumann learned from them and how much of what von Neumann wrote were his own ideas. In any case, I am more grateful to von Neumann than to the Eckert group, because all the other more important computer projects have started from the von Neumann report, while the work of Eckert and al. had quite a little influence. The ENIAC computer was very important only as a demonstration that it is possible to make very fast electronic computers, otherwise it had much less influence on the structure of computers than the many other slower computers made around that time.
masswerk 6y ago
According to J. Presper Eckert in his oral history interview [1] the Moore School was actually collecting patent applications, when von Neumann went public with the report. Which is why principal computer architecture is in the public domain. And, according to Eckert, this was done with a purpose and in von Neumann's self-interest. He also accused von Neumann of having done similarly at the IAS. (According to von Neumann, it was merely an oversight that his name was the only one on the report and it had been just an internal proposal for a draft of the final paper.) Eckert summarizes this condemnatory as follows on p.35: "You know, we finally regarded von Neuman as a huckster of other people's ideas with Goldstine as his principle mission salesman. Now, if you don't believe this, talk to Julian Biglow at the Institute for Advanced Study(…) Von Neumann was stealing ideas and trying to pretend work done at the Moore School was work he had done." [1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert conducted by Nancy Stern, 1977: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh013jpe.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...
- devindotcom 6y ago
  Interesting if true but it seems odd to think that Von Neumann of all people in the 20th century perhaps would need to steal someone's ideas. From what I've read of him he was more likely to improve on them before the ideator had finished speaking. But certainly those were days (if indeed we have left them) when 'great men' like him could and would take credit for something like that for reasons of pride and posterity.
  - masswerk 6y ago
    Eckert accused von Neumann specifically of doing so that he could consult for IBM on the matter. However, there is a problem with this: As I understand it, IBM wasn't that interested in computers at the time and actually stumbled into (electronic digital) computing by a government contract for replicating Whirlwind for the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE). On the other hand, Eckert also pointed out some interest shown repeatedly by von Neumann in bringing in commercial third parties into the project, so it may have been concerning any third party which may be interested in his consultancy, and this then became historically IBM.
jshier 6y ago
This isn't really true. There was no existing architecture and even if there was, Eckert and Mauchly weren't the only ones involved. ENIAC itself encapsulated almost none of the Von Neumann architecture principles. While it's true Von Neumann's paper started as a summary of ongoing discussions on computer architecture for the EDVAC with a group that included Eckert, Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and others, Von Neumann's proofs of the architecture's viability within the paper were entirely original. Hence the name. Jean Bartik was a hugely biased source who used personal recollection to quarrel with anyone who offered any view of computer history that didn't put ENIAC front and center. She seems to have spent the latter part of her life writing strident negative Amazon reviews of any book which didn't place Eckert and Mauchly and the ENIAC as the primary source of all computer innovation. Her reviews [1] of Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History in particular were extremely negative personal attacks on the author and her husband (Alice and Arthur Burks) for having written books which dared question ENIAC's supremacy. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Now the water is really muddy... Is there a defitive book or wiki page for the whole thing regarding: * Von Neumann's actual contribution to the so-called von Neumann architecture
  - SquishyPanda23 6y ago
    Here is the wiki page on the report and the controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...
    - justicezyx 6y ago
      “““ The treatment of the preliminary report as a publication (in the legal sense) was the source of bitter acrimony between factions of the EDVAC design team for two reasons.[3] First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented; second, 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. Hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the First Draft led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone. (See Matthew effect and Stigler's law.) ””” This seems more vague than what have been disclosed here...
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
What a crime that such 22 year old memories are locked away in an amazon comment, to be lost whenever amazon deems it necessary to cull comments older than a certain age.
- echelon 6y ago
  The whole internet is like this. Everything is atrophying. Remember personal websites and blogs? Barely anybody runs them anymore. Archive Team is doing amazing work, and we need to support them.
- dolmen 6y ago
  It appears someone (some machine?) asked the Web Archive to save it before I did. https://web.archive.org/web/20210407045457/https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483 https://web.archive.org/web/20210407045457/https://www.amazo...
- globular-toast 6y ago
  It's not locked away. Copy the text and save it on your disk if you think it's important to you. Publish it on your own blog if you think it's important to everyone. People seem to forget about the "save" functionality included in every web browser for some reason. You should save anything you deem important enough if you fear it might be gone one day. This is no different from acquiring a copy of an important book for your own shelf. Where would you prefer this comment to reside? Where would it have lived before the web?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    While I'm generally in favor of preserving digital history, I don't really disagree. In a world where so many utterances and video can be preserved--and just wait until a lot of people are wearing AR glasses everywhere and AI/ML systems can increasingly tag and organize all that recording and associate it with real world identities--I'm not sure we even want everything to be saved even if it were possible.
croes 6y ago
ENIAC the worlds first computer? What about Z3 by Konrad Zuse? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  The winners write history. It's interesting that the Z3 was denied funding from the German gov't for not being war-important. It turns out they were ahead of the computing game and squandered it, as US and GB relied on computers for code breaking and performing calculations for developing the atom bomb. It's not a blunder to the tune of invading Russia, but it's still interesting.
  - mardifoufs 6y ago
    Yeah I disagree here. The general public's knowledge on WW2 and their perception of that war usually has been very disproportionately influenced and shaped directly by the post wars memoirs of german generals & other important figures of the 3rd Reich. Which is why there are so many myths and outright falsehoods on the war (pushed by those authors to rehabilitate/distance themselves from their own actions) that are still very very widely believed to be true. It's pretty fitting that "history is written by the victors" is one of those narratives. Plus it makes even less sense when ww2 Germany is almost always believed to have been way ahead of the allies technologically. Way more than they actually were, so unless the allies were veryyy bad at rewriting history to erase Germany's contributions... I'd probably guess It's more due to it being a very obscure technology and had almost no "cool" factor, and v. little influence on the overall technology compared to the V-2 or jet fighters
    - Hydraulix989 6y ago
      So was the German Z3 not the first digital computer? Or were the Germans ahead of the Allies technologically in this case?
- aap_ 6y ago
  There was no first computer. The further you go back the less it becomes a computer, the further you go forward the less it becomes a first. I can really recommend the book "ENIAC in Action" on this matter and of course on the ENIAC generally.
tpetricek 6y ago
I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which is worth reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-Changed/dp/1612480861 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Compute... It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".

by Rochus 6y ago

djmips 6y ago

True but on the other hand, he kind of made computers 'open source'

Rochus 6y ago
> he kind of made computers 'open source' The only "positive" (depeding on perspective) effect of his illegal and morally questionable action was that the patent was declared null and void due to the novelty-damaging effect of his report, among other issues supporting this outcome. The computers however did not become more "open source" because of this, just cheaper.
- amilios 6y ago
  Still a semi-positive outcome no? Computers becoming cheaper?
  - masswerk 6y ago
    J. Presper Eckert (the Eckert in "Eckert & Mauchly") in his oral history interview [1], p.46f: > "Originally we called ENIAC the "MANIAC" when it didn't work right. And later they borrowed that name for some other actual machine. But if you worked for von Neumann on the MANIAC, then if you invented something it belonged to you. Well, on some relatively short notice, like it might have been a week, or a month, or something, a short time before the deadlines hit, von Neumann went down and published all that stuff. All the reports of the engineers went to the Library of Congress which put a bar on any patents being obtained by any of his employees. And when they complained about it to him, he just said, "Well, that's tough; that's the way I think; that stuff should be in the public domain." Now there is a perfectly obvious reason for this. He was consulting with people like IBM. If the things weren't patented that would be a problem for IBM. The idea was he was selling ideas to other people...if it wasn't covered by patents, he would have been selling something they couldn't use. They would have come back and said, now, "what kind of a consultant are you, coming up with new ideas which are already patented by others and we can't use them." But if these ideas could come under the public domain, then he could go around and sell them to people. That was his game." [1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert (1977): https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275
    - adrian_b 6y ago
      For the humanity, the publication of the von Neumann report was certainly a very positive thing because it launched a large number of research projects with the purpose of building electronic computers, both in USA and in many other countries. There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower. Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly. Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer. Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951. If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later. I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al. It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused. Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else. The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply. Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him. Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).
      - adrian_b 6y ago
        I want to add that the fast evolution of computers caused by the publication of the von Neumann report and the lack of "IP protection" is paralleled by the fast evolution of semiconductor devices after the discovery of the transistor, which was also caused by the lack of "IP protection" in the modern sense. Even if the transistors have been patented, the patents have been licensed to anyone for negligible fees or even for free (e.g. for hearing aids). If the essential transistor patents had been used like worthless patents are used today in preventing competition, the history of the computer and electronics industries would have been very different, with progress delayed by decades. So both the publication of the von Neumann report and the generous handling of the transistor patents have been very influential in shaping the word of today, while many inventions where the inventors clinged to the patents have been either doomed or they began to be used only after the patents have expired, more than 20 years later.
- eru 6y ago
  Declaring a patent null and void seems like a positive outcome. Patents are legally enforced monopolies after all.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    So the end justifies all means? Consultants and employees who reveal trade secrets to sabotage patents are heroes in your eyes, not criminals?

smaddox 6y ago

Wow... How is this not more well known? It's not like von Neumann doesn't have plenty of other important contributions to his name.

kalium-xyz 6y ago
Most people who have a lot of things named after then wanted to have a lot of things named after them. Consider: why is more named after von Neumann then Erdos?
- eru 6y ago
  Compared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Paul_Erd%C5%91s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pau... Seems more or less a tie to me. [0] Especially compared to this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car... [0] Actually, it's not a tie: If you add the entries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Erd%C5%91s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er... you get a clear winner.
  - gcanyon 6y ago
    There's a large number of things named after Euler as well -- so many that sometimes things are named after the first person to prove them after Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo...
masswerk 6y ago
Have a look the oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert, it's a long lasting controversy: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh013jpe.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...

ducktective 6y ago

How come it's known as "von Neumann" architecture?

jonnybgood 6y ago
Stigler's law of eponymy?
madhadron 6y ago
So a little bit longer version of the story: Eckert and Mauchly had designed the architecture. Herman Goldstine, the military liaison of the ENIAC project, and something of a social climber, sought out von Neumann to see if he was interested. von Neumann was, and came to a lot of design meetings and made contributions about what the instruction set should be. Then when he was heading out to Los Alamos on a trip, he had some downtime during travel and wrote up the design for the group. Goldstine typed it up and circulated it with just von Neumann's name on it. It is a point of discredit to von Neumann that he did not disavow the naming of the architecture. Funnily, Goldstine's wife was one of the early programmers and well respected in that area. Goldstine himself made no significant contributions to computing.
adrian_b 6y ago
The name "von Neumann" is rightly applied to this, because von Neumann was the first who has written a complete and consistent description of this architecture, so that anybody could understand it and build computers based on this architecture. The Eckert group had some rather vague ideas about the architecture of their future computer, the successor of ENIAC, and those ideas certainly included some kind of stored program (not necessarily stored in the same memory as the data; stored programs were not new, as they were common in mechanical or electromechanical computers). However the Eckert group was secretive, because they hoped to start after the war their own company to make computers and become rich, so it is not known for sure how much von Neumann learned from them and how much of what von Neumann wrote were his own ideas. In any case, I am more grateful to von Neumann than to the Eckert group, because all the other more important computer projects have started from the von Neumann report, while the work of Eckert and al. had quite a little influence. The ENIAC computer was very important only as a demonstration that it is possible to make very fast electronic computers, otherwise it had much less influence on the structure of computers than the many other slower computers made around that time.

masswerk 6y ago

According to J. Presper Eckert in his oral history interview [1] the Moore School was actually collecting patent applications, when von Neumann went public with the report. Which is why principal computer architecture is in the public domain. And, according to Eckert, this was done with a purpose and in von Neumann's self-interest. He also accused von Neumann of having done similarly at the IAS. (According to von Neumann, it was merely an oversight that his name was the only one on the report and it had been just an internal proposal for a draft of the final paper.) Eckert summarizes this condemnatory as follows on p.35: "You know, we finally regarded von Neuman as a huckster of other people's ideas with Goldstine as his principle mission salesman. Now, if you don't believe this, talk to Julian Biglow at the Institute for Advanced Study(…) Von Neumann was stealing ideas and trying to pretend work done at the Moore School was work he had done." [1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert conducted by Nancy Stern, 1977: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275 PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh013jpe.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...

devindotcom 6y ago
Interesting if true but it seems odd to think that Von Neumann of all people in the 20th century perhaps would need to steal someone's ideas. From what I've read of him he was more likely to improve on them before the ideator had finished speaking. But certainly those were days (if indeed we have left them) when 'great men' like him could and would take credit for something like that for reasons of pride and posterity.
- masswerk 6y ago
  Eckert accused von Neumann specifically of doing so that he could consult for IBM on the matter. However, there is a problem with this: As I understand it, IBM wasn't that interested in computers at the time and actually stumbled into (electronic digital) computing by a government contract for replicating Whirlwind for the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE). On the other hand, Eckert also pointed out some interest shown repeatedly by von Neumann in bringing in commercial third parties into the project, so it may have been concerning any third party which may be interested in his consultancy, and this then became historically IBM.

jshier 6y ago

This isn't really true. There was no existing architecture and even if there was, Eckert and Mauchly weren't the only ones involved. ENIAC itself encapsulated almost none of the Von Neumann architecture principles. While it's true Von Neumann's paper started as a summary of ongoing discussions on computer architecture for the EDVAC with a group that included Eckert, Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and others, Von Neumann's proofs of the architecture's viability within the paper were entirely original. Hence the name. Jean Bartik was a hugely biased source who used personal recollection to quarrel with anyone who offered any view of computer history that didn't put ENIAC front and center. She seems to have spent the latter part of her life writing strident negative Amazon reviews of any book which didn't place Eckert and Mauchly and the ENIAC as the primary source of all computer innovation. Her reviews [1] of Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History in particular were extremely negative personal attacks on the author and her husband (Alice and Arthur Burks) for having written books which dared question ENIAC's supremacy. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17

justicezyx 6y ago
Now the water is really muddy... Is there a defitive book or wiki page for the whole thing regarding: * Von Neumann's actual contribution to the so-called von Neumann architecture
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago
  Here is the wiki page on the report and the controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the_EDVAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    “““ The treatment of the preliminary report as a publication (in the legal sense) was the source of bitter acrimony between factions of the EDVAC design team for two reasons.[3] First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented; second, 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. Hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the First Draft led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone. (See Matthew effect and Stigler's law.) ””” This seems more vague than what have been disclosed here...

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

What a crime that such 22 year old memories are locked away in an amazon comment, to be lost whenever amazon deems it necessary to cull comments older than a certain age.

echelon 6y ago
The whole internet is like this. Everything is atrophying. Remember personal websites and blogs? Barely anybody runs them anymore. Archive Team is doing amazing work, and we need to support them.
dolmen 6y ago
It appears someone (some machine?) asked the Web Archive to save it before I did. https://web.archive.org/web/20210407045457/https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483 https://web.archive.org/web/20210407045457/https://www.amazo...
globular-toast 6y ago
It's not locked away. Copy the text and save it on your disk if you think it's important to you. Publish it on your own blog if you think it's important to everyone. People seem to forget about the "save" functionality included in every web browser for some reason. You should save anything you deem important enough if you fear it might be gone one day. This is no different from acquiring a copy of an important book for your own shelf. Where would you prefer this comment to reside? Where would it have lived before the web?
- ghaff 6y ago
  While I'm generally in favor of preserving digital history, I don't really disagree. In a world where so many utterances and video can be preserved--and just wait until a lot of people are wearing AR glasses everywhere and AI/ML systems can increasingly tag and organize all that recording and associate it with real world identities--I'm not sure we even want everything to be saved even if it were possible.

croes 6y ago

ENIAC the worlds first computer? What about Z3 by Konrad Zuse? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

Hydraulix989 6y ago
The winners write history. It's interesting that the Z3 was denied funding from the German gov't for not being war-important. It turns out they were ahead of the computing game and squandered it, as US and GB relied on computers for code breaking and performing calculations for developing the atom bomb. It's not a blunder to the tune of invading Russia, but it's still interesting.
- mardifoufs 6y ago
  Yeah I disagree here. The general public's knowledge on WW2 and their perception of that war usually has been very disproportionately influenced and shaped directly by the post wars memoirs of german generals & other important figures of the 3rd Reich. Which is why there are so many myths and outright falsehoods on the war (pushed by those authors to rehabilitate/distance themselves from their own actions) that are still very very widely believed to be true. It's pretty fitting that "history is written by the victors" is one of those narratives. Plus it makes even less sense when ww2 Germany is almost always believed to have been way ahead of the allies technologically. Way more than they actually were, so unless the allies were veryyy bad at rewriting history to erase Germany's contributions... I'd probably guess It's more due to it being a very obscure technology and had almost no "cool" factor, and v. little influence on the overall technology compared to the V-2 or jet fighters
  - Hydraulix989 6y ago
    So was the German Z3 not the first digital computer? Or were the Germans ahead of the Allies technologically in this case?
aap_ 6y ago
There was no first computer. The further you go back the less it becomes a computer, the further you go forward the less it becomes a first. I can really recommend the book "ENIAC in Action" on this matter and of course on the ENIAC generally.

tpetricek 6y ago

I was looking through the comments to see if someone mentioned Jean Bartik already! Just to add to this comment, she also wrote an autobiographical book, which is worth reading: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Computer-Changed/dp/1612480861 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-Programmer-Jennings-Compute... It is clearly a very personal and biased account, but I think there are good reasons to believe many of the things she is saying, even when they go against the commonly accepted history "written by the winners".