This might be minor, but an error seems to be made repeatedly in this article: the machine was not built at "Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies," but rather at "The Institute for Advanced Study" which is located in Princeton, NJ but completely independent from Princeton University.
you’re right but I think the phrasing is fair. Princeton in the passage effectively refers to the location, not the university, and there are other places called “Institute for Advanced Studies” so you probably need to disambiguate
Goldstine also wrote a very interesting book called "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann" that chronicles some of his experiences and also shows the depth of his research trying to draw inspiration from earlier calculating machines.
Looks like von Neumann was the first Open Source computing guy. And I had no clue that Goldstine was the designer of the IBM 701 and the public domain IAS was it's engineering ancestor. So an early example of monetizing open source too!
"The IAS Machine was highly influential, though, and plans for its design were distributed widely, partly due to von Neumann’s insistence that advances be kept in the public domain. Many computers were built using the IAS Machine as a starting point, including the first IBM Mainframe, the IBM 701."
von Neumann was no open source advocate. He was actively trying to patent (some of) the ideas in the "First Draft" when the Army got wind of it. In a meeting early in 1947, von Neumann, Eckert, and Mauchly ALL got told that it was too late, because the "Draft" was considered public.
"The engineering challenges, especially in the design and construction of an acceptable primary memory unit, were more difficult than originally anticipated."
Right. This is, again, the memory hardware problem. Eckert had been building computing machines since the 1930s, and his programs were on cams. In 1949, IBM started selling a "memory unit" the IBM 941, that stored 16 10-digit numbers, using about a cubic meter of relays.[1]
Multiple memory units could be plugged into an IBM Card Programmed Calculator.
It was possible to store short programs in the relays.[1] So it was a very limited "stored program" machine.
It was recognized by workers in the field for years before the IAS machine that stored program computers were desirable, if only someone could build something to store the programs. Something with an affordable cost per bit. That was the limitation.
You should know: Eckert and Mauchly had already conceived the idea of the stored program long before "Johnny" arrived on the scene, but they made the pragmatic decision to finish the ENIAC under their original design. The stored program would have to wait until the next machine: the EDVAC. They were under constraints that prevented them from publishing the ideas, whereas Von Neumann was free to swoop in, grok the ideas (it was Von Neumann after all) and publish them without attribution. Though in fairness, he just wrote the draft - it was really Goldstine that put the icing on the cake by distributing the draft and ultimately cementing the term "Von Neumann architecture". Because he was an intellectual giant, it was easy for outsiders to just bin the whole thing as another one of Johnny's great ideas. Von Neumann was an incredible mind, but he and Goldstine are "the bad guys" in this story. Eckert and Mauchly have been written out of history despite being originators of perhaps the most important concepts underlying all of modern computers:
a. Make it fully electronic
b. You can store the program the same way you store the data
(You can quibble about whether Zuse or Turing described stored-program approaches earlier, but these were significantly more hypothetical / non-practical than the designs being discussed for the EDVAC. This is kind of a theme: there are many sideshows in early computing which were flirting with the right ideas, but the ENIAC and subsequent Moore school lectures stand out as the ancestors of everything that actually went anywhere. The cambrian explosion started there, which is why people get strung out about who gets the credit.)
> 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.
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] thread"The IAS Machine was highly influential, though, and plans for its design were distributed widely, partly due to von Neumann’s insistence that advances be kept in the public domain. Many computers were built using the IAS Machine as a starting point, including the first IBM Mainframe, the IBM 701."
Right. This is, again, the memory hardware problem. Eckert had been building computing machines since the 1930s, and his programs were on cams. In 1949, IBM started selling a "memory unit" the IBM 941, that stored 16 10-digit numbers, using about a cubic meter of relays.[1] Multiple memory units could be plugged into an IBM Card Programmed Calculator. It was possible to store short programs in the relays.[1] So it was a very limited "stored program" machine.
It was recognized by workers in the field for years before the IAS machine that stored program computers were desirable, if only someone could build something to store the programs. Something with an affordable cost per bit. That was the limitation.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/cpc.html
(You can quibble about whether Zuse or Turing described stored-program approaches earlier, but these were significantly more hypothetical / non-practical than the designs being discussed for the EDVAC. This is kind of a theme: there are many sideshows in early computing which were flirting with the right ideas, but the ENIAC and subsequent Moore school lectures stand out as the ancestors of everything that actually went anywhere. The cambrian explosion started there, which is why people get strung out about who gets the credit.)
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.
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.