You are right, but even after they were no longer bound by secrecy they never published anything important, which would help advance the computer technology as much as the publications of other computer projects, e.g. from Cambridge, IAS, NIST, MIT or even IBM.
I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann.
At least in other cases where some people had secret knowledge that became public only much later, e.g. in the case of the public-key cryptography discovered by the British before Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, they could show some classified reports containing the secret knowledge.
The Eckert group has not shown any previous documents containing the ideas from the von Neumann report, but they just claimed that most ideas have already been communicated during the previous discussions of the group.
That might be true, or not, but it does not matter much.
Only the publication of the von Neumann report was really important, regardless who was the source for the ideas contained in it.
> but even after they were no longer bound by secrecy they never published anything important
There were a lot of publications; the first one in September 1945 (three month after Goldstein disclosed the Neuman paper) named "Automatic High Speed Computing, A Progress Report on the EDVAC" (see https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10272462...), which was also prior to the patent and yet another reason for its invalidity.
> I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann.
Having a look at the timeline Neumann was not aware of the project before the ENIAC design was completed.
I have not seen any document from them that could establish credibly how much von Neumann learned from them and how much they have learned from von Neumann.
At least in other cases where some people had secret knowledge that became public only much later, e.g. in the case of the public-key cryptography discovered by the British before Diffie-Hellman-Merkle, they could show some classified reports containing the secret knowledge.
The Eckert group has not shown any previous documents containing the ideas from the von Neumann report, but they just claimed that most ideas have already been communicated during the previous discussions of the group.
That might be true, or not, but it does not matter much.
Only the publication of the von Neumann report was really important, regardless who was the source for the ideas contained in it.