I've always found the theoretical background and implementation/development of the computer to be facinating. If anyone knows good books they can recommend please let me know...
In late 1945, the Institute for Advanced Study embarked on a project that departed from the realm of the purely theoretical. With no laboratory facilities, the Institute was not, at first sight, an obvious choice for Professor John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project. But these were extraordinary times -- times of war and postwar urgency, and von Neumann was a persuasive advocate for the project. Over the objections of some IAS Faculty and with the support of others, such as Oswald Veblen and Institute Director (1939-47) Frank Aydelotte, the project found a home, albeit in the basement of Fuld Hall initially.
The original impetus for an electronic computing device stemmed from the pressing demands of war. The goal of the ECP was to build a machine that would be a general-purpose postwar tool for the disparate branches of scientific research.
From the start of World War II, von Neumann had been heavily occupied as a consultant to the military. He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee at the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, from 1940 on; a member of the Navy Bureau of Ordnance from 1941 to 1955; a consultant to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from 1943 to 1955; and a member of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project in Washington, D.C., from 1950 to 1955.
Through a chance encounter, von Neumann engaged with a team of engineers in the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly were constructing an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) under the leadership of J. G. Brainerd. Herman H. Goldstine, a mathematician and Reserve Officer of the Ordnance Department who was the army liaison to the Moore School, recognized von Neumann--already famous for his contributions to mathematics, physics, and economics--on a railway platform in 1944. Goldstine approached, introduced himself and, after a brief conversation, invited von Neumann to Philadelphia.
Even as the ENIAC was being constructed, its successor was being designed. Begun in 1943, ENIAC had thousands of vacuum tubes, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Running on almost 200 kilowatts of electricity and weighing over thirty tons, it has been described as being bigger than a dinosaur with no more memory than a gnat. It became operational in 1945 and was formally dedicated in 1946. Von Neumann contributed immensely to the discussions of its successor.
In the spring of 1945, von Neumann drafted a document that described the logical structure of a desired high-speed automatic digital computing system powerful enough to solve complex mathematical problems, such as non linear partial differential equations (of two or three independent variables), in abstract terms drawn from biology. The abstraction freed the concepts of the nascent computer from the constraints posed by the technology of the era and, ultimately, stimulated the growth of that technology. Von Neumann's logical schema served as the basis for subsequent stored-program computers. In identifying the organs required as those relating to arithmetic, memory, control, and input and output devices, subsequently known as von Neumann Architecture, he laid down the basic schema of the modern computer. Von Neumann was fascinated by the relationship of computers to the brain, in particular, the relationship between the language of mathematics and the communications of the central nervous system.
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