5 ms·

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.
- mannerheim 6y ago
  This reminds me of the Newton-Leibniz calculus priority dispute, with Newton not publishing on calculus until after Leibniz had, although with that we now at least have the benefit of contemporary correspondence to refer to.
- Rochus 6y ago
  They were "secretive" because they were obligated to do so. It was a secret, military project, and nothing could be published. Ironically, it was the security officer (H. Goldstein) who (illegally) circulated the Neumann paper; no one had expected it, least of all the actual inventors.
  - ducktective 6y ago
    Did von Neumann himself ever acknowledge that the whole thing originated somewhere else or did he cite any of that group's findings? In all documentaries on the origins of computers that I've watched, von Neumann gets all of the recognition while many of us have heard about Eckert and Mauchly from a Wikipedia article or comment deep down a relevant article.
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    You are right, but even after they were no longer bound by secrecy they never published anything important, which would help advance the computer technology as much as the publications of other computer projects, e.g. from Cambridge, IAS, NIST, MIT or even IBM. I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann. At least in other cases where some people had secret knowledge that became public only much later, e.g. in the case of the public-key cryptography discovered by the British before Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, they could show some classified reports containing the secret knowledge. The Eckert group has not shown any previous documents containing the ideas from the von Neumann report, but they just claimed that most ideas have already been communicated during the previous discussions of the group. That might be true, or not, but it does not matter much. Only the publication of the von Neumann report was really important, regardless who was the source for the ideas contained in it.

Stigler's law of eponymy?

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.

mannerheim 6y ago
This reminds me of the Newton-Leibniz calculus priority dispute, with Newton not publishing on calculus until after Leibniz had, although with that we now at least have the benefit of contemporary correspondence to refer to.
Rochus 6y ago
They were "secretive" because they were obligated to do so. It was a secret, military project, and nothing could be published. Ironically, it was the security officer (H. Goldstein) who (illegally) circulated the Neumann paper; no one had expected it, least of all the actual inventors.
- ducktective 6y ago
  Did von Neumann himself ever acknowledge that the whole thing originated somewhere else or did he cite any of that group's findings? In all documentaries on the origins of computers that I've watched, von Neumann gets all of the recognition while many of us have heard about Eckert and Mauchly from a Wikipedia article or comment deep down a relevant article.
- adrian_b 6y ago
  You are right, but even after they were no longer bound by secrecy they never published anything important, which would help advance the computer technology as much as the publications of other computer projects, e.g. from Cambridge, IAS, NIST, MIT or even IBM. I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann. At least in other cases where some people had secret knowledge that became public only much later, e.g. in the case of the public-key cryptography discovered by the British before Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, they could show some classified reports containing the secret knowledge. The Eckert group has not shown any previous documents containing the ideas from the von Neumann report, but they just claimed that most ideas have already been communicated during the previous discussions of the group. That might be true, or not, but it does not matter much. Only the publication of the von Neumann report was really important, regardless who was the source for the ideas contained in it.