serial structure that parts of the machine may be sitting idle, doing the electronic equivalent of twiddling their thumbs, while waiting for another part of the machine to finish a task. A related problem is that with such a structure there are delays caused by the constant need to shuttle data and instructions between the memory and the processor, along the bus, a deficiency which became known as âthe von Neumann bottleneck.â It got this name because the Moore School plan became known as the von Neumann architecture. And that happened in somewhat acrimonious circumstances.
Working at von Neumann's direction, Goldstine took von Neumann's notes and the letters they had exchanged and prepared a document just over 100 pages long, called âFirst Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,â which was reproduced in limited numbers and distributed to a select few at the end of June 1945. The ideas discussed in this report were less advanced than those of Alan Turing discussed in the previous chapter , but were much more influential, because of the way they were promoted.
But the way they were promoted did not please everyone.The snag was that the report appeared with only one name on it as author: that of John von Neumann. Adding injury to insult, the document was later regarded as a publication in the legal sense of the term, placing the ideas in the public domain and preventing them from being patented. And compounding the injury, it transpired that in May 1945 von Neumann had signed a lucrative consultancy deal with IBM, in exchange for which he assigned (with a few exceptions) all the rights to his ideas and inventions to them. Hardly surprising that Eckert later complained that âhe sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM.â 14
Von Neumann now decided that he really wanted a computer at the IAS, where he was based, and with breathtaking insouciance asked the Moore School team to join him there. Goldstine took up the offer; Mauchly and Eckert left the academic world and formed the Electronic Control Company, which became a pioneering and successful commercial computer business, achieving particular success with their UNIVAC machine (Universal Automatic Computer). The EDVAC project staggered on without them, but by the time it was completed, in 1951, it was largely outdated, made obsolescent by other machines built using the architecture described in the âFirst Draftââmachines conforming to what was now widely known as the von Neumann architecture, bottleneck and all.
The scene was now set for decades of development of those ideas, with valves giving way to transistors and chips, machines getting smaller, faster and more widely available, but with no essential change in the logical structure of computers. The Turing machine in your pocket owes as much to von Neumann (who always acknowledged his debt to âOnComputable Numbersâ) as to Turing, but is no more advanced in terms of its logical structure than EDVAC itself.
There is no need to go into details about the development of faster and more powerful computers in the second half of the twentieth century. But I cannot resist mentioning one aspect of that story. In a book published as late as 1972, Goldstine commented: âIt is however remarkable that Great Britain had such vitality that it could immediately after the war embark on so many well-conceived and well-executed projects in the computer field.â 15 Goldstine had been at the heart of the development of electronic computers, but the veil (actually, more like an iron curtain) of secrecy surrounding the British codebreaking activities was such that a quarter of a century after the developments described here, he was unaware of the existence of Colossus, and thought that the British had had to start from scratch on the basis of the âFirst Draft.â What they had really done, as we have seen, was even more remarkable.
SELF-REPLICATING ROBOTS
This isn't quite
Working at von Neumann's direction, Goldstine took von Neumann's notes and the letters they had exchanged and prepared a document just over 100 pages long, called âFirst Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,â which was reproduced in limited numbers and distributed to a select few at the end of June 1945. The ideas discussed in this report were less advanced than those of Alan Turing discussed in the previous chapter , but were much more influential, because of the way they were promoted.
But the way they were promoted did not please everyone.The snag was that the report appeared with only one name on it as author: that of John von Neumann. Adding injury to insult, the document was later regarded as a publication in the legal sense of the term, placing the ideas in the public domain and preventing them from being patented. And compounding the injury, it transpired that in May 1945 von Neumann had signed a lucrative consultancy deal with IBM, in exchange for which he assigned (with a few exceptions) all the rights to his ideas and inventions to them. Hardly surprising that Eckert later complained that âhe sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM.â 14
Von Neumann now decided that he really wanted a computer at the IAS, where he was based, and with breathtaking insouciance asked the Moore School team to join him there. Goldstine took up the offer; Mauchly and Eckert left the academic world and formed the Electronic Control Company, which became a pioneering and successful commercial computer business, achieving particular success with their UNIVAC machine (Universal Automatic Computer). The EDVAC project staggered on without them, but by the time it was completed, in 1951, it was largely outdated, made obsolescent by other machines built using the architecture described in the âFirst Draftââmachines conforming to what was now widely known as the von Neumann architecture, bottleneck and all.
The scene was now set for decades of development of those ideas, with valves giving way to transistors and chips, machines getting smaller, faster and more widely available, but with no essential change in the logical structure of computers. The Turing machine in your pocket owes as much to von Neumann (who always acknowledged his debt to âOnComputable Numbersâ) as to Turing, but is no more advanced in terms of its logical structure than EDVAC itself.
There is no need to go into details about the development of faster and more powerful computers in the second half of the twentieth century. But I cannot resist mentioning one aspect of that story. In a book published as late as 1972, Goldstine commented: âIt is however remarkable that Great Britain had such vitality that it could immediately after the war embark on so many well-conceived and well-executed projects in the computer field.â 15 Goldstine had been at the heart of the development of electronic computers, but the veil (actually, more like an iron curtain) of secrecy surrounding the British codebreaking activities was such that a quarter of a century after the developments described here, he was unaware of the existence of Colossus, and thought that the British had had to start from scratch on the basis of the âFirst Draft.â What they had really done, as we have seen, was even more remarkable.
SELF-REPLICATING ROBOTS
This isn't quite
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