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Regarding "very confused ideas": To be fair, Mauchly proposed combined program and data storage in a mercury delay line, much like it was done on the UNIVAC I,
by masswerk 6y ago
Regarding "very confused ideas":
To be fair, Mauchly proposed combined program and data storage in a mercury delay line, much like it was done on the UNIVAC I, in 1945, before von Neumann arrived. (Allegedly, there had been ideas for stored program in the ENIAC group even earlier than this.) Mauchly also invented Short Code (1949, originally named Brief Code), the first programming language used in production, and the Critical Path Method for automatic scheduling. The group around Maurice Wilkes attended his 1946 lectures on the design of digital computers and went from there to build the EDSAC, the very first modern computer.