Stats for nerds
2recommend
11mentions
10people
2010–2026years
18% recommend82% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Following this article, is very interesting to read the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" by Von Neumann (1945):
- I also like "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" which essentially goes into thinking sort of questions that we today take for granted. For instance: 1) What arithmetic operations should one put into hardware ? 2) Do we really need main memory ? 3) How should I/O look like ? Fascinating read.
- Just had an interesting conversation about book collecting this weekend: we asked each other which of their books is so obscure or rare that it's unlikely anybody else you know owns a copy.
For me, it's a printed copy of von Neumans "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", the groundwork for modern computer architecture. Bought it from Kronecker Wallis, a tiny Spanish publisher.
- Eckert and Mauchly weren't reliable narrators of the history of their work, given how much they needed to claim in order to get the patents that were later invalidated. They claimed quite a few things that were later disproven in court or through historical study. At the least, Eniac was designed by the team at the Moore School.
von Neumann's "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" was both a summary of discussions by the Eniac team as well as von Neumann's own original work proving and expanding on various aspects of those discussions. It's called the von Neumann architecture because he was the author of the seminal paper, not because he laid any particular claim to the ideas. Eckert and Mauchly were mostly upset about the paper's existence, regardless of author, because it made it impossible for them to patent the stored program idea in general.
- John Vincent Atanasoff has written in 1940 a very good report about the design of the Atanasoff-Berry computer (“Computing Machine for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations”).
In this report, he had analyzed which are the possible solutions for implementing a computer memory. He enumerated 5 kinds of memories: with mechanical bi-stable devices, with electro-mechanical bi-stable devices (e.g. polarized relays), with ferromagnetic materials, SRAM (with vacuum-tube flip-flops) and DRAM (with capacitors).
His list covered very well the most important kinds of memories used later.
The report “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” written by John von Neumann in 1945 added to these alternatives the memories made with delay lines (an idea presumably taken from the discussions with the ENIAC team). Moreover, the von Neumann report has also added a second variant of DRAM besides that using discrete capacitors, i.e. the DRAM made with a charge-storing image tube, like those used at that time for video cameras ("iconoscope memory").
Therefore the idea of the Williams tube has been taken directly from the von Neumann report. It is not known whether this idea has originated from von Neumann himself or whether he had got it from someone else.
- No, the John von Neumann report ("First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC") is dated 30 June 1945 and it was widely circulated during the following months in typewritten copies.
Freely-downloadable copies can be easily found now by searching the Internet.
This 1945 report is the one which initiated all the many research projects for building digital electronic computers during the following years, at various universities from USA and UK, and at various research institutions from USA and UK, e.g. NIST, NPL, IAS, followed then by projects at various commercial companies.
Regarding credits, this draft of a report was the result of discussions over several months with the members of the ENIAC team about how the successor of ENIAC should be made.
There were no British results that could have been credited in it (except very old results obtained many years before WWII; most digital electronic circuits, like flip-flops and digital counters, had been invented in UK, either by British or by people of other nationalities working in UK), so the credits could have shown only which ideas came from von Neumann himself, which ideas came from members of the ENIAC team, and which were older ideas, already popularized by people like Howard Aiken and others who had designed electro-mechanical computers.
Since the draft document that went "viral" through the research community was not a final paper ready for publishing, it can hardly be criticized for lacking a bibliography and credits section.
Moreover, the ENIAC team members cannot really complain about not receiving appropriate credits in the draft document, because now we know that they had actually learned useful information from John Atanasoff at the Iowa State College, but they have never credited him in any way.
From both John Atanasoff (1940) and John von Neumann (1945) we have very valuable reports describing how to make a digital electronic computer, where many important ideas appear for the first time in public documents. From the members of the ENIAC team, we do not have any document of comparable quality, so their greatest merit is that they have taught John von Neumann a part of what they have learned during the ENIAC project, enabling the latter to write a synthesis good enough to enable any competent electronics engineer to start designing a digital electronic computer.
Besides explaining whatever he had learned from the ENIAC team, John von Neumann discussed in his report various possible improvements, like having a random-access memory instead of a sequential-access memory.
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