[defphysics]

I see this in wikipedia:

"The attribution of the invention of the architecture to von Neumann is controversial, not least because Eckert and Mauchly had done a lot of the required design work and claim to have had the idea for stored programs long before discussing the ideas with von Neumann and Herman Goldstine[3]"

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

[jazzyjackson]

Yes, von Neumann was tasked with doing a write up of what Eckert and Mauchly were up to in the course of their contract building the eniac/edvac. meant to be an internal memo. goldstein leaked the memo and the ideas inside were attributed to the author, von Neumann. this prevented any of the work being patented btw, since the memo served as prior art.

The events are covered in great detail in Jean Jennings Bartik's autobiography "Pioneer Programmer", according to her von Neumann really wasn't that instrumental to this particular project, nor did he mean to take credit for things -- it was others that were big fans of his that hyped up his accomplishments.

I attended a lecture by Mauchly's son, Bill, "History of the ENIAC", he explains how eniac was a dataflow computer that, when it was just switches and patch cables, could do operations in parallel. There's a DH Lehmer quote, "This was a highly parallel machine, before von Neumann spoiled it." https://youtu.be/EcWsNdyl264

[userbinator]

I think the stored-program concept was also present internally at IBM around those times, although as usual no single person got the credit for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC