

John von Neumann, EDVAC, and the IAS Machine - benev
http://www.linuxvoice.com/john-von-neumann/?pk_campaign=hn&pk_kwd=vn2

======
hga
A couple of nits:

" _It was developed to run artillery calculations, but due to the involvement
of von Neumann and Los Alamos, in the end the first calculation it ran was
computations for the hydrogen bomb, using around a million punch cards._ "

A more significant reason might be that while it was commissioned during WWII
(middle of '43), it wasn't completed until half a year after the war ended.

" _Some of the famous IAS machines include MANIAC (at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory; von Neumann was involved with this one too and was responsible for
the name), the IBM 701 (IBM’s first commercial scientific computer, with 17
installations), and ORACLE (in Oak Ridge National Laboratory)._ "

The Whirlwind project
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I)
beat all of the above mentioned computers in building a bit parallel computer.
Also developed magnetic core memory for computers, significantly increased the
lifetime of vacuum tubes (electrodes had too much silicon), was the
grandfather of the minicomputer, and per the book on it, a talk by the primary
inventor, Jay Forrester, and what I've otherwise gathered, pretty much defined
the modular way we build computers. Forrester commented that he left the field
afterwords because all of the interesting things had been done.

