[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

Andru Luvisi luvisi at gmail.com
Tue Dec 29 10:05:15 AEST 2015


On January 29, 1944 J. Presper Eckert wrote a memo explaining how
information could be stored on spinning disks, using one large memory to
hold intermediate results, lookup tables, and program information.  This
was several months before von Neumann joined the project.  See A History of
Computing in the Twentieth Century (1980).

von Neumann did a good job of writing up the idea, but it would have
happened without him.

Andru

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> Jon von Neumann was born in 1903; without him, we probably wouldn't have
> had computers at all (but we could've had a Wintel version, I suppose,
> wherein everything is controlled by BB).
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>
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