Herman Goldstine, an army lieutenant waiting for a train at Aberdeen, Maryland, recognises the most famous mathematician in the world on the platform and mentions a machine in Philadelphia. John von Neumann's visit became a 101-page draft report with one name on it, a priority war with Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the design every computer has used since: instructions kept in the same memory as the numbers. He ended his life under military guard, working on how a brain differs from his own machine.
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- In this chapter
- John von Neumann, Herman Goldstine, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Klári von Neumann, Julian Bigelow, Arthur Burks, Stanislaw Ulam
- The idea it builds
- The stored program: memory as a row of numbered pigeonholes holding instructions and numbers alike, so that a program can write a program.