It Began with Babbage (24 page)

49
. Ibid., p. 154.

50
. Ibid., p. 155.

51
. R. K. Richards. (1955).
Arithmetic operations in digital computers
(p. 98). Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.

52
. Burks, 1947, op cit., p. 760.

53
. Quoted from J. P. Eckert, J. W. Mauchly, H. H. Goldstine, & J. G. Brainerd. (1945). Description of the ENIAC and comments on electronic digital computing machines. Contract W670 ORD 4926. Philadelphia, PA: Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
Oxford English Dictionary
[On-line]. Available:
http://oed.com
.

54
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 241.

55
.
Oxford English Dictionary
, op cit.

56
. This example is taken from Goldstine, op cit., p. 160.

57
. P. B. Medawar & J. S. Medawar. (1983).
Aristotle to zoo: A philosophical dictionary of biology
(pp. 225–226). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. For an authoritative text on this law see Gould, op cit.

58
. J. P. Steadman. (1979).
The evolution of designs
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; G. Basalla. (1988).
The evolution of technology
. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; H. Petroski. (1988).
The evolution of useful things
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; S. Dasgupta. (1996).
Technology and creativity
(
Chapter 8
). New York: Oxford University Press.

59
. Dasgupta, op cit., p. 146.

60
. This diagram is taken from Dasgupta, op cit., p. 147.

61
. Mollenhoff, op cit., p. 59.

62
. Mauchly, 1942, op cit., p. 329.

63
. Burks & Burks, op cit., pp. 334–335.

64
. Ibid.

65
. Ibid., p. 341.

66
. Ibid., p. 364.

67
. Ibid., p. 363.

68
. Ibid.

69
. Ibid., pp. 371–372.

70
. N. Stern. (1980). John William Mauchly: 1907–1980 (obituary).
Annals of the History of Computing, 2
, 100–103.

71
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 326.

72
. The records of the trial documented as
The ENIAC Trial Records
, U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota, Fourth Division: Honeywell, Inc.
v
. Sperry Rand Corp. et al, No. 4-67, Civ. 138. Decided October 19, 1973: Judge Earl Larson. Judge Larson's decision was published in the
U.S. Patent Quarterly, 180
, 673–773. The court records are available at the Charles Babbage Institute of the History of Computing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and also online. Available:
www.cbi.umn.edu

73
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 312.

74
. Larson, as cited in the records of the ENIAC Trial,
www.cbi.umn.edu
, op cit.

75
. Burks & Burks, op cit. (pp. 311–312).

76
. Ibid., p. 385.

77
. Randell, 1980, op cit., pp. 74–75; see Comment by B. Randell in Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 397.

78
. Burks & Burks, Comment by B. Randell, op cit., pp. 396–397.

79
. H. Goldstine & A. Goldstine. (1946). The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).
Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, 2
, 97–110. Reprinted in Randell, 1975, op cit. (pp. 333–347). (See especially p. 333.)

80
. D. J. Wheeler. (1951).
Automatic computing with the EDSAC
(p. 5). PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge.

81
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 226.

82
. Ibid., p. 231.

83
. Ibid., p. 235.

IN THE
ENIAC story so far, John von Neumann has had a fleeting presence. We saw that the BRL formed a high-powered scientific advisory committee at the start of World War II, well before the United States entered the war. von Neumann was a member of this committee and it is unlikely that anyone in the committee was as influential in the American scientific world or, for that matter, in the corridors of power in Washington, DC, than him.

By the beginning of the 1940s, von Neumann had a massive reputation in the mathematical universe. His contributions spanned many regions of pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, even formal logic. He was one of the six mathematicians originally appointed as professors at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, when it was founded in 1933
¹
—another was Einstein. In 1944, von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902–1977) published a book titled
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
, thus founding and establishing for posterity the scientific discipline known as game theory.

Herman Goldstine, who came to know von Neumann very well—first through their involvement with the BRL and then, after the war, at the Institute of Advanced Study, where Goldstine went to work with von Neumann on what came to be called the IAS computer project
²
—wrote vividly about von Neumann's intellectual persona, of his ever-ready receptiveness to new ideas, his responsiveness to new intellectual challenges, his mental restlessness when between projects, and the single-mindedness with which he pursued an idea that captured his attention.
³

Oddly enough, despite his involvement with the BRL, he was apparently unaware of the ENIAC project until a chance meeting with Goldstine in a railway station in
Aberdeen, Maryland. Goldstine recalls how the entire tone and tenor of their first conversation, initially casual and relaxed, changed when von Neumann realized that Goldstine was involved with the development of a high-speed electronic computer. Thereafter, Goldstine writes, he felt as he was being grilled in a doctoral oral examination.
⁴
Thus began their association, a relationship that only ended with von Neumann's death from cancer in 1957.
⁵
And thus began von Neumann's engagement with computers.

Soon after this meeting in August 1944, von Neumann accompanied Goldstine to Philadelphia to witness the ENIAC.
⁶
From that point on, von Neumann was a regular visitor to the Moore School, attending meetings with the ENIAC designers.
⁷

However, von Neumann's interest in computers did not originate
only
out of intellectual curiosity. Like every one else, his engagement with automatic computing stemmed from dissatisfaction with the status quo. Working in the field of applied mathematics called hydrodynamics (or fluid dynamics), he had pondered on the use of computational approaches for solving analytical equations.
⁸
Beginning in 1943, von Neumann was also associated with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (later renamed the Los Alamos National Laboratory), where the Manhattan Project was underway to develop the atom bomb and, in this context, concerned with solutions to nonlinear systems of equations, he was in search of methods for expediting solutions to such problems.
⁹

Even as the ENIAC was being implemented, its designers were recognizing its weaknesses. Its memory, constructed of vacuum tubes, was far too small in capacity for handling many large problems, but larger memories using tubes were deemed unrealizable. A different electronic technology was needed for the memory. Besides, the use of plugboards, cables, and manual switches to program and set up the machine for each fresh task was too cumbersome, too slow. Goldstine would recall that, by August 1944, he was chafing at how clumsy the mechanism was for programming the ENIAC.
¹⁰
Clearly, despite what he and Adele Goldstine would write in their report on the ENIAC in 1946 (see
Chapter 7
, Section IX), well before that report was written, the ENIAC was
not
deemed general-purpose enough.

The very act of implementation revealed not only that the design-as-theory was inadequate in satisfying the ENIAC's intended purpose, but also that the purpose itself needed to be extended. Perhaps further thought during the design and planning process revealed these shortcomings. But, human beings—even the most intellectually brilliant and the most creative of them—are ultimately limited in their cognitive capacities. People suffer from what polymath scientist Herbert Simon, conceiver of the idea of the sciences of the artificial (see Prologue, Section III), famously termed
bounded rationality
.
¹¹
This is why the empirical approach is so important in the sciences—natural or artificial. The act of experimentation (in the case of the artificial sciences, this entails implementation) is a
way of circumventing bounded rationality. The ENIAC's implementation yielded information about the ENIAC that thinking alone about the design did not.

Changing the design of the ENIAC midstream was out of the question. The needs of ballistic calculation for a war still raging were urgent. Instead, the ENIAC team envisioned a new project that could be initiated after the ENIAC was completed. A new contract was signed between the BRL and the Moore School to build “a new ENIAC of improved design.”
¹²

Meetings ensued at which von Neumann was present. The outcome was that, by the end of August 1944, certain very specific requirements for the new ENIAC were identified. The machine would (a) contain many fewer tubes than the then-current machine and hence would be cheaper and easier to maintain, (b) be capable of handling many types of problems not easily adaptable to the current ENIAC, (c) be capable of storing cheaply and at high speed large quantities of numeric data, (d) be of such a character that the setup of a new problem would require very little time, and (e) be smaller in size than the current ENIAC.
¹³

In fact, there was already a candidate for a memory device that would meet requirement (c). It was called a
mercury delay line
(or ultrasonic memory) with which Presper Eckert had worked in connection with the development of radar (one of the major technoscientific products of World War II). As for requirement (d), what was needed was a means of setting up a problem “automatically,” providing a capability for “automatic programming of the facility and processes.”
¹⁴

More meetings ensued in which, along with Eckert, Mauchly, Goldstine, Burks, and other members of the ENIAC group, von Neumann participated. A name was given to the proposed computer: Electronic Discrete Variable Arithmetic Computer (EDVAC). By March 1945, a first report on this machine would state that “problems of logical control” had been discussed and analyzed, and that von Neumann would submit a summary analyzing the logical organization of the EDVAC.
¹⁵

More discussions followed on the proposed EDVAC design.
¹⁶
More significantly, von Neumann had by then written up the promised “preliminary draft.”
¹⁷

This draft of 1945, comprising 100 mimeographed pages, was titled
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
. Its sole author was von Neumann. Thus was born a myth—that the ideas and principles articulated in this report were von Neumann's alone. In a sense, anyone reading this document cannot be blamed for thinking so. When a scientific or scholarly or technical paper of any sort shows the names of people in its byline, the reader infers that these are the names of the authors. If others also contribute, then at the very least a list of names is usually inserted in a footnote or at the end of the document. However, the EDVAC report of 1945 showed only von Neumann's name as the author. Nor were there any acknowledgments in the document to anyone else.

Perhaps von Neumann was not to blame. The report was intended as a preliminary document (as the title announced) for circulation within the ENIAC group. What it became, however, was an unpublished paper authored by von Neumann that entered into computer lore.

Needless to say, this myth created much controversy. It fostered resentment. Maurice Wilkes (soon to enter this story), writing in 1985, felt that a serious injustice had been done to Eckert and Mauchly, who had not been given their rightful credit for the ideas von Neumann described in the EDVAC report, some of which they had, apparently, arrived at even before von Neumann entered the project.
¹⁸

Let us then admit that the contents of the EDVAC report represented the collective thoughts of several minds. Yet, the fact is that von Neumann synthesized it all into a masterly monograph. He was its sole writer, if not the only author of its contents. He created a scientific text of a depth and elegance that was
his
art and no one else's. In earlier centuries, certain texts (such as
Two New Sciences
[1638] by Galileo [1564–1642] or
Principles of Geology
[1830–1833] by Charles Lyell [1797–1875]) created paradigms in their respective domains.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
falls in this same category (as we will see), and John von Neumann was its author.

Let us consider what made this report so important to our story.

The first major contribution made by the EDVAC report was its emphasis on the
logical
design and principles of a computer and their delineation from
physical
principles. We now refer to the logical design of a computer—which must not be confused with logic design, a term used to mean the design of circuits with behavior that can be described by Boolean algebra (see
Chapter 5
, Sections III and IV)—as
computer architecture
. Although this latter term would not enter the language of computer science for several more years, what the EDVAC report ushered in was the explicit recognition that there was a distinction to be made between a computer's architecture and its physical implementation. The architecture is an
abstraction
of the physical machine and concerns itself with a computer's logical and functional elements and their relationships, and how they relate to the tasks the computer is intended to perform. Conversely, by articulating a computer architecture, decisions concerning the physical implementation may be deferred.