[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Dave Horsfall]

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."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Kurt H Maier]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 06:23:50AM +1100, 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).

Sure we would have had computers.  We just wouldn't have had privilege
escalations based on stack smashes.  That guy ruined the ENIAC!

khm

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2015-Dec-28 06:23:50 +1100, 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

There were computers before von Neumann - mostly female.

Without the von Neumann architechure, an entire class of exploits
wouldn't exist.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Andru Luvisi]

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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[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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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Jon von Neumann!

[Norman Wilson]

Dave Horsfall:

  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 this day in Australia, but not yet in North America or Europe.

Or, as Warren would probably prefer, it was 2015 in England, but still only
1903 in Australia.  Such was the great difference in time twixt these two
great nations.

Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart,
the liver, the kidneys, and the giblets,
and every other part!

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON