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> 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

> 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.