| > In terms of actual influence the much more obvious choice for father of computer science is Charles Babbage, whose work was both influential during his lifetime and who pioneers like von Neumann and Aiken referenced in their development of early working computers. This is a strange thing to say. George Dyson in Turing's Cathedral wrote: > “Von Neumann was well aware of the fundamental importance of Turing’s paper of 1936 ‘On computable numbers …’ which describes in principle the ‘Universal Computer’ of which every modern computer (perhaps not ENIAC as first completed but certainly all later ones) is a realization,” Stanley Frankel explains. “Von Neumann introduced me to that paper and at his urging I studied it with care.… He firmly emphasized to me, and to others I am sure, that the fundamental conception is owing to Turing.” Re-quoting Randell, On Alan Turing and the Origins of Digital Computers [1]. Dyson also came and gave a talk at Google as part of the book tour [2], and the talk consisted of him telling stories about the book and showing pictures of interesting artifacts. At 18:51 he shows a picture of Turing's paper as stored in the IAS library, and this is what he has to say: > And so it irritated me how all these historians still are arguing about "What did Von Neumann take from Turing? Why didn't he give Turing credit? Did he read Turing's paper?" People say "oh no he didn't read Turing's paper." So I decided I would go look in Von Neumann's library. > Turing's paper was published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. That's the volume it was in. When you go to the Institute [for Advanced Study] library, all the volumes are absolutely untouched, mint, hardly been opened except volume 42. And it's clearly, you know, it's been read so many times it's completely fallen apart. They didn't have Xerox machines so they just... Yeah, so the engineers I spoke with, the few that were left said "Yeah... we all had to read that paper. That's what we were doing was building a Turing machine." So I think that answers the question. [1] https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/159999 [2] https://youtu.be/_FibuHyIHnU?t=1131 |
It's ridiculously different.