From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2015 12:07:37 +1100 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20151229010737.GO14449@eureka.lemis.com> On Monday, 28 December 2015 at 16:05:15 -0800, Andru Luvisi wrote: > On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Dave Horsfall 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 -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 181 bytes Desc: not available URL: