Comment by jshier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jshier | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't really true. There was no existing architecture and even if there was, Eckert and Mauchly weren't the only ones involved. ENIAC itself encapsulated almost none of the Von Neumann architecture principles. While it's true Von Neumann's paper started as a summary of ongoing discussions on computer architecture for the EDVAC with a group that included Eckert, Mauchly, Arthur Burks, and others, Von Neumann's proofs of the architecture's viability within the paper were entirely original. Hence the name.

Jean Bartik was a hugely biased source who used personal recollection to quarrel with anyone who offered any view of computer history that didn't put ENIAC front and center. She seems to have spent the latter part of her life writing strident negative Amazon reviews of any book which didn't place Eckert and Mauchly and the ENIAC as the primary source of all computer innovation. Her reviews [1] of Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History in particular were extremely negative personal attacks on the author and her husband (Alice and Arthur Burks) for having written books which dared question ENIAC's supremacy.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2MERA4EUZ8M17

There is not only Jean Bartik; there is a lot of recorded history, even court cases that left many files and affidavits. Bartik's commentary lent itself because it is with the book I referenced. Burks' case is also amply documented. He wanted to be registered as an inventor on the patent after the fact, which was denied to him, even by a court. In his bitterness, he then made many claims. The comment by Bartik you reference should be seen in this context.

Fascinating when individuals of such advanced intelligence are not obsessed with immortality. Either They believe it is not possible or they are secretly a god trying to escape the boredom of already having long since achieved it.

Sometimes I wish von Neumann had gone into another field, such as genetics.

He basically did.

He was creating frameworks for understanding self-replicating systems before the nature of DNA had been determined.

Or they have realized that immortality is actually a dumb idea. Either you talk about real immortality where you live forever. And forever is a really long time. Or you talk about being able to decide when to die. In which case dying accidentally today becomes much more expensive so you become obsessed about avoiding accidental death today and miss the whole point of living a longer life...

Quoting a character in one of Stanisław Lem's stories, "People do not really want to live forever -- they simply do not want to die." Always struck me as a rather profound take on the whole immortality deal.

Von Neumann definitely didn't want to die. According to Wigner: "When Jancsi realized that he was incurably ill, his logic made him conclude that he would cease to exist, cease to have thoughts. The full content of this was incomprehensible to him and it horrified him. We all know this and try to accept it, but it is always difficult. It was heartbreaking to watch the frustration in his mind when the hope was gone. His fate was unavoidable to him, but it was still unacceptable."

His friends and colleagues were very disappointed that at the very end he turned to religion to help him cope with his fears. He even had a priest visit him for last rites. (Source: A Beautiful Mind)

To add another source, Greg Evan's Permutation City is what drove home for me how profoundly inhuman immortality is.

I think it's incredibly arrogant to talk with such certainty about biological immortality. It's not something we can fathom at this time.

You are suggesting that death is somehow less dumb when you don’t know anything about the true existential nature of what that is.

If you get philosophical, I don't think you can really know anything about anything. However, in practice I have every reason to assume that I have been practically dead i.e. non-existent for the vast majority of the lifetime of our universe (and whatever universes there may have been outside our one, whatever that may mean.) And I do not recall being non-existent that bad... Dying, that's another thing, that I know nothing about and am not looking forward for it - quite yet. But I know that the amount of things I want to do here is finite. And based on knowing myself and the feelings of quite a few old people, I am quite sure that when those would be done, I would be happy to let go. (Only small thing that I might want from approximately infinite life, would be to know how this life story here on earth/universe ends.)

Well said

Or maybe they are horrified with the idea of living forever...

Now the water is really muddy...

Is there a defitive book or wiki page for the whole thing regarding: * Von Neumann's actual contribution to the so-called von Neumann architecture

Here is the wiki page on the report and the controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_the...

“““ The treatment of the preliminary report as a publication (in the legal sense) was the source of bitter acrimony between factions of the EDVAC design team for two reasons.[3] First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented; second, some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent. Hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the First Draft led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone. (See Matthew effect and Stigler's law.) ”””

This seems more vague than what have been disclosed here...

How does Turing’s work factor into this? Does Bartik also discredit his influence on computer architecture?

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