Description

Photograph of a large section of the display case shown in GCP-00004651. This section focuses on John von Neumann, although many other items are layered underneath. The two largest captions read:

"The Stored Program. In 1944, the Army asked the Moore School to build a more powerful calculator than the ENIAC, which was then still under construction. One year later John von Neumann responded with a complete 'logical design' for a machine to be called the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). In von Neumann's paper was imbedded the remarkable idea of a 'stored program,' now universal to computers. He suggested that the instructions for the computer--always before entered on punched paper tape, or by plugboards--could be stored in the computer's electronic memory as numbers, and treated in exactly the same manner as numerical data. For the first time, then, logical choices of program sequences could be made inside the machine, and the instructions could be modified by the computer as it went along."

"Information Machines. John von Neumann had given a 'blueprint' for the modern computer, and almost immediately a number of machines were started in England and America. With the exception of von Neumann's I.A.S. computer, most of the new machines were named in the acronymic style of the ENIAC--EDSAC, SEAC, EDVAC, MANIAC, MADM, BINAC, UNIVAC; perhaps 15 in all were in progress or completed by 1950. While these computers were all modern, electronic, digital, stored-program machines, their technologies differed considerably. This was possible because the 1946 report of Burks, Goldstine and von Neumann was written in terms of a logical design (an 'architecture'). This important idea allowed a variety of technology solutions."

Original credit line: Charles Eames