[jecel]

Herman Goldstine made the decision to distribute the report. Though Eckert and Mauchly liked to think they came up with the idea before von Neumann came along and that he got the idea from them, it is very hard to know if that is true. Kurt Gödel, who von Neumann helped get out of Austria at the start of the war and come work with him at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, had already published the idea of using numbers to encode algorithms as part of his famous 1931 proof. And while Turing Machines use the Harvard architecture, the Universal Turing Machine at the end of Alan Turing's 1936 paper is a von Neumann one.