[chubot]

Tangential, but one thing I learned from dense computer history book The Dream Machine is that the term "von Neumann architecture" is improperly assigning credit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture

von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report. And his name was on the report which made people think that he came up with the idea, which was false. It also resulted in a patent dispute -- it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if the concept had been patented. The book goes into detail on this.

The wikipedia article also talks about Turing machines as a precedent that store data and code in the same place. But ironically I'd say that probably gives him too much credit! I think a large share should go to the people who designed a working machine, because it's easy to say come up with the idea of an airplane; much harder to make it work :) And to me it seems unlikely that the Turing Machine, which was an idea created to prove mathematical facts, was a major inspiration for the design of the ENIAC.

Finally, even though the author of this web page has his own credit dispute, I appreciate this elaboration on the credit assigned to Turing.

[jecel]

> von Neumann simply described the work of Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC in a written report.

Actually, it was a study group to come up with the successor to ENIAC (called EDVAC) which included Eckert, Mauchly, von Neumann, Goldstine and Burks. Von Neumann was the last to join, but wrote down the group's conclusions in a memo meant for the group. Herman Goldstine typed that up into a nice report but listed von Neumann as the sole author and distributed 24 copies to researchers. Many new copies of the report were made and circulated causing confusion about who had created the ideas.

George Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral", on the other hand, argues that von Neumann's close relationship with Gödel had a major role in getting the stored program idea adopted by the EDVAC group.