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You should know: Eckert and Mauchly had already conceived the idea of the stored program long before "Johnny" arrived on the scene, but they made the pragmatic

You should know: Eckert and Mauchly had already conceived the idea of the stored program long before "Johnny" arrived on the scene, but they made the pragmatic decision to finish the ENIAC under their original design. The stored program would have to wait until the next machine: the EDVAC. They were under constraints that prevented them from publishing the ideas, whereas Von Neumann was free to swoop in, grok the ideas (it was Von Neumann after all) and publish them without attribution. Though in fairness, he just wrote the draft - it was really Goldstine that put the icing on the cake by distributing the draft and ultimately cementing the term "Von Neumann architecture". Because he was an intellectual giant, it was easy for outsiders to just bin the whole thing as another one of Johnny's great ideas. Von Neumann was an incredible mind, but he and Goldstine are "the bad guys" in this story. Eckert and Mauchly have been written out of history despite being originators of perhaps the most important concepts underlying all of modern computers: a. Make it fully electronic b. You can store the program the same way you store the data (You can quibble about whether Zuse or Turing described stored-program approaches earlier, but these were significantly more hypothetical / non-practical than the designs being discussed for the EDVAC. This is kind of a theme: there are many sideshows in early computing which were flirting with the right ideas, but the ENIAC and subsequent Moore school lectures stand out as the ancestors of everything that actually went anywhere. The cambrian explosion started there, which is why people get strung out about who gets the credit.)

klelatti 3y ago
> he (von Neumann) and Goldstine are "the bad guys" in this story Von Neumann and Goldstine are clearly at fault in not crediting Eckert and Mauchly at all in the 'first draft'. The precise role of the players in developing the concept is disputed though. The 'first draft' is the first complete description of a stored program computer - there is no comparable document from Eckert and Mauchly - and it's inconceivable that Von Neumann didn't contribute significantly to the design. And if we are focused on practical designs, then Eckert and Mauchly weren't even the first to implement a working stored program computer using the approach set out in the first draft. We can disagree whether distributing the 'first draft' was morally right. My personal view is that doing so and hence invalidating the patents was a huge net good.
- waveboy 3y ago
  >invalidating the patents was a huge net good. I hear "this put the computer in the public domain" a lot. But it was patented, and that didn't stop the digital revolution one bit. Eckert and Mauchly filed a patent (on ENIAC) and it was believed to be valid for the next 25 years. That doesn't mean anybody tried to create a monopoly. IBM quickly traded some punch card patent rights with the owner, Remington Rand, for the (still pending!) ENIAC patent. Once it was finally granted Remington Rand pressed for royalties from the other computer companies. Evidently they asked for too much, and that fomented Honeywell's suit to invalidate the patent, which succeeded. That, technically, put the ENIAC in the public domain, but by then there were thousands of other computer related patents on the books. They annoy, especially the bad ones, but business goes on.

klelatti 3y ago

> he (von Neumann) and Goldstine are "the bad guys" in this story Von Neumann and Goldstine are clearly at fault in not crediting Eckert and Mauchly at all in the 'first draft'. The precise role of the players in developing the concept is disputed though. The 'first draft' is the first complete description of a stored program computer - there is no comparable document from Eckert and Mauchly - and it's inconceivable that Von Neumann didn't contribute significantly to the design. And if we are focused on practical designs, then Eckert and Mauchly weren't even the first to implement a working stored program computer using the approach set out in the first draft. We can disagree whether distributing the 'first draft' was morally right. My personal view is that doing so and hence invalidating the patents was a huge net good.

waveboy 3y ago
>invalidating the patents was a huge net good. I hear "this put the computer in the public domain" a lot. But it was patented, and that didn't stop the digital revolution one bit. Eckert and Mauchly filed a patent (on ENIAC) and it was believed to be valid for the next 25 years. That doesn't mean anybody tried to create a monopoly. IBM quickly traded some punch card patent rights with the owner, Remington Rand, for the (still pending!) ENIAC patent. Once it was finally granted Remington Rand pressed for royalties from the other computer companies. Evidently they asked for too much, and that fomented Honeywell's suit to invalidate the patent, which succeeded. That, technically, put the ENIAC in the public domain, but by then there were thousands of other computer related patents on the books. They annoy, especially the bad ones, but business goes on.