[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Monday, 28 December 2015 at 16:05:15 -0800, Andru Luvisi wrote:
> 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).
>
> 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).

If anybody's interested, there's an online version of this memo at
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/k-8-pdf/k-8-u2775-Mauchly-letter-plus.pdf ,
not the first document on that page.

Greg
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