> some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent.
he also got the US military to pay for the R&D and to make the results of all the research in the public domain. he got into a big fight with Einstein over whether or not they would do experiments at IAS (Einstein only wanted to do math and theory there)
"Differences over individual contributions and patents divided the group at the Moore School. In keeping with the spirit of academic enquiry, von Neumann was determined that advances be kept in the public domain. ECP progress reports were widely disseminated. As a consequence, the project had widespread influence. Copies of the IAS machine appeared nationally"
He also posthumously patented a "non-von Neumann" architecture that has never been built, to my knowledge. I'm surprised that all the attention on quantum computing hasn't revived the idea.
There's been a lot of interesting research in superconducting computer architectures that bear similarities to these concepts; some of it pursuant to quantum computing, some classical. [1] DACs that use switching of Josephson junctions to store persistent current, [2, 3] logic and storage elements based on the superconducting phase change (e.g. the ability of a metal to hold a voltage differential), and even [4] rudimentary AQFP-based FPGAs! I've seen talks describing more elaborate versions of [4] but can't find a good paper. A pretty good overview of this frontier is [5].
Many of the examples proposed sound similar to other devices and things used in - for example - flash memory, DRAM, and other similar technologies.
Based on what I could see from the patent, it looks like an exploration of using such elements in place of (then) vacuum tubes; it also seems like it might also use non-linear properties; somewhat of an "analog computer" in a way.
There also seem to be hints at these elements being used in an "artificial neuron" manner (hardware-based artificial neural networks and neurons were a topic of interest at the time).
Strangely (I may have missed it - I only skimmed the patent) the use of the transistor seems to be missing (again, not sure)...but if this is true, it may be because again - it seems to be exploring non-linear storage and response as memory and computational elements.
The ideas of using - say - capacitive and inductive elements for memory elements (at a minimum) was known back then; it was also known how to use inductive-only elements for amplification and switching purposes (google "magnetic amplifiers" - the tech goes back a long way). But this patent seems to be using both in a different manner for a combination computation and memory (again, similar to an artificial neuron).
It's a very interesting patent; in a similar scope as to Turing's writings on neural network systems. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Whitehead's quote from that article ("Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it") is elegantly stating that it's unoriginal turtles all the way down.
Interesting read.
My explanation. There are a lot more people that are B class scientists than A class. They are more likely to stumble on new ideas, but they might be unable to articulate them or they may not have the audience that will listen. It takes an A class scientist to bring those ideas forward.
> Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.
Yes! It’s a pretty big controversy so far as computing goes and a very interesting read. ENIAC (ISBN 978-0802713483) is a good account that includes it.
I have to wonder what else gets washed away in all the myth-making about these guys.
Do note that he proposed a description but it wasn't his idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...
> some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent.