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Tools For Thought: The People and Ideas of the Next Computer
Revolution
By Howard Rheingold
First published by Simon & Schuster, 1985. Copyright Howard
Rheingold, 1985. This book is out of print; all rights have reverted to the
author. Feel free.
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Chapter Four: Johnny Builds bombs and Johnny Builds Brains
If you asked then thousand people to name the most influential thinker of the
twentieth century, it is likely that not one of them would nominate John von
Neumann. Few would even recognize his name. Despite his obscurity outside the
communities of mathematicians and computer theorists, hit thoughts had an
incalculable impact on human destiny. He died in 1957, but the fate of the human
race still depends on how we and out descendants decide to use the technologies
von Neumann's extraordinary mind made possible.
..
At the end of his life he was an American, and a power behind the scenes of
American scientific policy and foreign policy. But that was only the last of
several equally distinguished identities in different countries and fields of
thought. Janos Neumann, known as "Jansci," was a prodigious young chemical
engineer turned mathematician and logician in Hungary in the early 1920s. Johann
von Neumann was one of the elite quantum physics revolutionaries in Gottingen,
Germany, in the late twenties. And from 1933 until his death, he was John von
Neumann of Princeton, New Jersey; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Washington, D.C.,
known to professors and Presidents as "Johnny."
..
Ada and Babbage could only dream of the day their device could be put to
work. Turing was a tragic victim of political events before he could get his
hands on a computer worth the name. Johnny, however, not only managed to get his
machines built and use them to create the first working principles of
software--but he also ended up telling his government how to use the new
technology. He was responsible for much more than the first boost in
accelerating American effort to develop computer technology.
..
A combination of many different scientific and political developments led to
the invention of ENIAC. Electronic tube technology, Boolean logic, Turing-type
computation, Babbage-Lovelace programming, and feedback-control theories were
brought together because of the War Department's insatiable hunger for raw
calculating power. John von Neumann was the only man who not only knew enough
about the scientific issues but moved comfortable enough in the societies of
Princeton and Los Alamos and Washington to grasp the threads and weave them
together in an elegant and powerful design.
..
Von Neumann was a very important, probably indispensable, member of the
Manhattan Project scientific team. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Bohr, Lawrence,
and the other members of the most gifted scientific gathering of minds in
history were as awed by Johnny's intellect as anyone else who ever met him. More
impressively, they were as reliant on his mathematical judgment as anyone else.
In that galactic cluster of world-class physicists, chemists, mathematicians,
and engineers, it was a rare tribute that von Neumann was put in charge of the
mathematical calculations upon which all their theories--and the functioning of
their "gadget"--would depend.
..
As if his significant contributions to the development of the first nuclear
weapons and the first computers were not enough for one man, he was also one of
the original logicians who had posed the questions that Turing and Kurt Godel
answered in the 1930s. He was a cofounder of the modern science of game theory
(picking up where Babbage left off), one of the founders of operational research
(also, curiously, advancing a field first explored by Babbage), an active
participant in the creation of quantum physics, one of the first people to
suggest analogies and differences between computer circuits and brain processes,
and one of the first scientists since Turing to examine the relationship between
the mathematics of code-making and the mystery of biological reproduction.
..
Von Neumann ended up a key policy-maker in the fields of nuclear power,
nuclear weapons, and intercontinental ballistic weaponry: he was the director of
the Atomic Energy Commission and an influential member of the ICBM Committee.
Generals and senators were lucky to get an appointment. Even when he was dying,
the most powerful men in the world gathered around for a final consultation.
According to Admiral Lewis Strauss, former chairman of the Atomic Energy
commission: "On one dramatic occasion near the end, there was a meeting at
Walter Reed Hospital where, gathered around his bedside and attentive to his
last words of advice and wisdom, were the secretary of Defense and his Deputies,
the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and all the military Chiefs of
Staff."[1]
..
John von Neumann's political views, undoubtedly rooted in his upper-class
Hungarian past, were unequivocal and extreme, according to the public record and
his biographers. He not only used his scientific expertise to hasten and
accelerate the development of nuclear weapons and computer-guided missiles, but
counseled military and political leaders to think about using these new American
inventions against the USSR in a "preventive war." (In an article in
Life magazine, published shortly after he died, von Neumann was quoted
as saying: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you
say at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock.")[2]
..
In contrast to Turing, whom he knew from Turing's prewar stay at Princeton
and from their wartime work, von Neumann was a sophisticated, worldly, and
gregarious fellow, famous for the weekly cocktail parties he and his wife hosted
during his tenure at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and up on the Mesa
at Los Alamos. He had a substantial private income and an additional $10,000 a
year from the Institute. He was widely known to have a huge repertoire of jokes
in several languages, a vast knowledge of risqué limericks, and a casual manner
of driving so recklessly that he demolished automobiles at regular intervals,
always managing to emerge miraculously unscathed.
..
Despite his apparently charmed existence, von Neumann, like Ada Lovelace and
Alan Turing, died relatively young. Lovelace died of cancer at thirty-six,
Turing of cyanide at forty-two, and von Neumann of cancer at fifty-three. Like
many other Los Alamos veterans, he may have been a victim of exposure to
radiation during the early nuclear bomb tests. His death came as a shock to all
who knew him as a vital, lively, peripatetic, seemingly invulnerable individual.
Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann's mathematical colleague and lifelong friend, in a
memorial to Johnny published in a mathematical journal shortly after von
Neumann's death, described his physical presence in loving detail:[3]
..
Johnny's friends remember him in his characteristic poses: standing before
a blackboard or discussing problems at home. Somehow his gesture, smile, and
the expression of the eyes always reflected the thought or the nature of the
problem under discussion. He was of middle size, quite slim as a young man,
then increasingly corpulent; moving in small steps with considerable random
acceleration, but never with great speed. A smile flashed on his face whenever
a problem exhibited features of a logical or mathematical paradox. Quite
independently of his liking for abstract wit, he had a strong appreciation
(one might almost say a hunger) for the more earthy type of comedy and humor.
..
Everyone who knew him remembers to point out two things about von
Neumann--how charming and personable he was, no matter what language he was
speaking, and how much more intelligent that other human beings he always seemed
to be, even in a crowd of near-geniuses. Among his friends, the standard joke
about Johnny was that he wasn't actually human but was as skilled at imitating
human beings as he was at everything else.
..
Born into an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family, Jansci was fluent in five
or six languages before the age of ten, and he once told his collaborator Herman
Goldstine that at age six he and his father often joked with each other in
classical Greek. It was well known that he never forgot anything once he read
it, and his ability to perform lightning fast calculations was legendary.
..
One night I the middle of the summer of 1944, von Neumann encountered by
happenstance a mathematician of past acquaintance in the Aberdeen, Maryland,
train station. History might have been far different if one of their trains had
been scheduled a few minutes earlier. That accidental meeting in Aberdeen
presented von Neumann with a nearly completed approach to a problem the
strategic significance of which he was uniquely equipped to understand, the
details of which were complex and profound enough to attract his intellectual
curiosity, the successful completion of which could be hastened by the use of
his political clout.
..
Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, then associated with the U.S. Army Ordnance
Ballistic Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland, didn't know anything about the other
projects von Neumann was juggling at that time. But he knew that von Neumann's
security clearance was miles above his and that he was a member of the
Scientific Advisory Committee at the Ballistic Research Laboratory. So Goldstine
happened to mention that an Army project at the Moore School of Engineering was
soon to produce a device capable of performing mathematical calculations at
phenomenal speeds.
..
Years later, Goldstine remembered that he was understandable nervous upon
meeting the world-famous mathematician on the platform at the Aberdeen station.
Goldstine recalled:[4]
..
Fortunately for me, von Neumann was a warm friendly person who did his
best to make people feel relaxed in his presence. The conversation soon turned
to my work. When it became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the
development of an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per
second, the whole atmosphere of our conversation changed from one of relaxed
good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor's degree in
mathematics.
..
Because he had all-important reasons for wanting a fast automatic calculator,
von Neumann asked for a demonstration. At the Moore School of Engineering, he
met the gadget's inventors, Mauchly and Eckert, and the next years saw Johnny
adding Aberdeen as a regular stop on his Princeton-D.C.-Los Alamos shuttle. Like
everything else he turned his mind to, von Neumann immediately seemed to see
more clearly than anyone else the future potential of what was then only a crude
prototype. While the other principal creators of the first electronic computer
were either mathematicians or electrical engineers, von Neumann was also a
superb logician, which enabled him to understand what few others
did--that these gadgets were in a class quite far beyond that of superfast
calculating engines.
..
From those early meetings in 1944 to the eras of ENIAC, EDVAC, UNIVAC,
MANIAC, and (yes) JOHNNIAC, the problem of assigning legal and historical credit
to the inventors of the first electronic digital computers becomes a tangled
affair in which easy explanations are impossible and many conflicts are still
unresolved. Goldstine--the other man on the platform with von Neumann--had his
own version of the key events in early computer history. Mauchly and Eckert had
a distinctly different point of view. There was a tale of Stibitz at Bell Labs.
IBM's Thomas Watson, Senior, had yet another story. And a man in Iowa named
Atanasoff eventually had the unexpected last laugh in a courtroom in 1973.
..
Monumental court cases have been fought over the issue of assigning credit
for the invention of the modern computer, and even the legal decisions have been
somewhat murky. Certainly it was a field in which a few people all over the
world, working independently, reached similar conclusions. In the case of the
ENIAC team, it was a case of several determined minds working together.
..
It isn't hard to envision von Neumann coming onto the scene after others have
worked for years on the considerable engineering problems involved in building
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), then dominating the
voice of the group when they articulated their discoveries, not out of
self-aggrandizement, but because he undoubtedly had the most elegant way of
stating the conclusions that the group had arrived at, working in concert.
Because of von Neumann's prominence in other fields, and the way his charm
worked on journalists as well as generals, he was often described by the mass
media as the soleinventor of key concepts like the all-important
"stored program"--a credit he never claimed himself.
..
Although the matter of assigning credit for the earliest computer hardware is
a tricky business, there is no denying von Neumann's central role in the history
of software. His contributions to the science of computation in the late forties
and early fifties were preceded by even earlier theoretical work that led to the
notion of computation. He was one of the principal participants in both of the
lines of thought that converged into the construction of ENIAC--mathematical
logic and ballistics.
..
John von Neumann's role in the invention of computation began nearly twenty
years before the ENIAC project. In the late 1920s, between his major
contributions to quantum physics, logic, and game theory, young Johann von
Neumann of Gottingen was one of the principal players in the international game
of mathematical riddles that started with Boole seventy years prior and led to
Turing's invention of the universal machine a decade later.
..
The impending collision of philosophy and mathematics that was becoming
evident at the end of the nineteenth century made mathematicians extremely
uncomfortable. Slippery metaphysical concepts associated with human thought
might have appealed to minds like Boole's or Turing's. But to David Hilbert of
Göttingen and others of the early 1900s, such vagueness was a grave danger to
the future of an enterprise that intended to reduce all scientific laws to
mathematical equations.
..
The logical and metamathematical foundations of more "pure" forms of
mathematics, Hilbert insisted, could only be stated clearly in terms of
numerical problems and precisely defined symbols and rules and operations. This
was the doctrine of formalism that later spurred Turing to make his
astonishing discovery about the capabilities of machines. Johann von Neumann, a
student of Hilbert's, was one of the stars of the formalists. In itself, von
Neumann's metamathematical achievement was remarkable. His work in formalism,
however, was only part of what von Neumann achieved in several disparate fields,
all in the same dazzling year.
..
In 1927, at the age of twenty-four, von Neumann published five papers that
were instant hits in the academic world, and which still stand as monuments in
three separate fields of thought. It was one of the most remarkable
interdisciplinary triple plays in history. Three of his 1927 masterpieces were
critical to the field of quantum physics. Another paper established the new
field of game theory. The paper most directly to the future of computation was
about the relationship between formal logic systems and the limits of
mathematics.
..
In his last 1927 paper, von Neumann demonstrated the necessity of proving
that all mathematics was consistent, a critically important step toward
establishing the theoretical bases for computation (although nobody yet knew
that). This led, one year later, to a paper published by Hilbert that listed
three unanswered questions about mathematics that he and von Neumann had
determined to be the most important questions facing logicians and mathematics
of the modern era.
..
The first of these questions asked whether or not mathematics was
complete. Completeness, in the technical sense used by mathematicians,
means that every true mathematical statement can be proven (i.e., is the last
line of a valid proof).
..
The second question, the one that most concerned von Neumann, asked whether
mathematics (or any other formal system) was consistent. Consistency in
the technical sense means that there is no valid sequence of allowable steps (or
"moves" or "states") that could prove an untrue statement to be true. If
arithmetic was a consistent system, there would never be a way to prove that 1 +
1 = 3.
..
The third question, the one that opened the side door to computation, asked
whether or not mathematics was decidable. Decidability means that there
is some definite method that is guaranteed to correctly determine whether an
assertion is provable.
..
It didn't take long for a shocking answer to emerge in response to the first
Hilbert-von Neumann question. In 1030, yet another young mathematician, Kurt
Godel, showed that arithmetic cannot be complete, because there will always be
at least one true assertion that cannot be proved. In the course of
demonstrating this, Godel crossed a crucial threshold between logic and
mathematics when he showed that any formal system that is as rich as the number
system (i.e., contains the mathematical operators + and =) can be expressed in
terms of arithmetic.. This means that no matter how complicated mathematics (or
any other equally powerful formal system) becomes, it can always be expressed in
terms of operations to be performed on numbers, and the parts of the system
(whether or not they are inherently numerical) can be manipulated by rules of
counting and comparing.
..
Von Neumann's and Hilbert's third question about the decidability of
mathematics led Turing to his 1936 breakthrough. The "definite method" (of
determining whether a mathematical assertion is provable) that was demanded by
the decidability question was formulated by Alan Turing as a machine that could
operate in definite steps on statements encoded as symbols on tape. Gödel had
shown how numbers could represent the operations of formal system, and Turing
showed how the formal system could be described numerically to a machine
equipped to decode such a description (e.g., translate the system's rules into
the form "find a number n, such that . . . ", "n" being
expressible as a string of ones and zeroes).
..
All of these questions were terribly important at the time they were
formulated--to the few dozen people around the world who were equipped to
understand their significance. But in 1930, the rest of the population had more
important things to worry about that the hypothetical machines of the
metamathematicians. Even those who understood that universal machines could in
fact be built were in no position to begin such a task. Making a digital
computer was an engineering project that would require the kind of support that
only a national government could afford.
..
John von Neumann was at the institute for Advanced Study at Princeton by the
time young Godel and Turing came along. Although he was keenly aware of the
latest developments in the "foundation crisis of mathematics" he had helped
initiate in the late 1920s, von Neumann's restless intellect was attacking half
a dozen new problems by the early 1930s. To Johnny, still in his twenties, the
most important thing in life was to find "interesting problems."
..
In particular, he was interested in mathematical questions involving the
phenomenon of turbulence, and the dynamics of explosions and implosions happened
to be one area where such questions could be applied. He was also interested in
new mathematical methods for modeling complex phenomena like global weather
patterns or the passage of radiation through matter--methods that were powerful
but required such enormous numbers of calculations that future progress in the
field was severely limited by the human inability to calculate the results of
the most interesting equations in a reasonable length of time.
..
Von Neumann seemed to have a kind of "Midas Touch." The problems he tackled,
no matter how abstruse and apparently obscure they might have seemed at the
time, had a way of becoming very important a decade or two later. For example,
he wrote a paper in the 1920s on the mathematics underlying economic strategies.
A quarter of a century later it turned out to be a perfect solution to the
problem of how airplanes should search for submarines (as well as one of the
first triumphs of "operational research," one of the fields pioneered by
Babbage).[4]
..
By the 1940s, von Neumann's expertise in the mathematics of hydrodynamic
turbulence and the management of very large calculations took on unexpected
importance because these two specialties were especially applicable to a new
kind of explosion that was being cooked up by some of the old gang from
Göttingen, now gathered in New Mexico. The designers of the first fission bomb
knew that hellish mathematical problems in both areas had to be solved before
any of the elegant equations of quantum physics could be transformed into the
fireball of a nuclear detonation. As von Neumann already suspected, the
mathematical work involved in designing nuclear and thermonuclear weapons
created an avalanche of calculations.
..
The calculating power needed in the quest for thermonuclear weaponry ended up
being one of the highest-priority uses for ENIAC--top-secret calculations for
Los Alamos were the subject of the first official programs run on the device
when it became operational--although the reason the electronic calculator had
been commissioned in the first place was to generate the mathematical tables
needed for properly aiming conventional artillery.
..
The ENIAC project was started under the auspices of the Army Ballistic
Research Laboratory. Herman Goldstine, a historian of computation as well as one
of the key participants, took the trouble to point out that the word
ballistics is derived from the Latin ballista, the name of a
large device for hurling missiles. Ballistics in the modern sense is the
mathematical science of predicting the path of a projectile between the time it
is launched and the moment it hits the target. Complex equations concerning
moving bodies are complicated further by the adjustments necessary for winds of
different velocities and for the variations in air resistance encountered by
projectiles fired from very large guns as they travel through the atmosphere.
The results of all possible distance, altitude, and weather calculations for
guns of each specific size and muzzle velocity are given in "firing tables"
which artillerymen consult as they set up a shot.
..
The application of mass-production techniques to weapons meant that new types
of guns and shells were coming along at an unprecedented pace, making the
ongoing production of firing tables no easy task. During World War I, such
calculations were done by humans who were called "computers." But even then it
was clear that new methods of organizing these large-scale calculations, and new
kinds of mechanical calculators to help the work of human computers, would be an
increasingly important part of modern warfare.
..
In 1918 the Ballistics Branch of the Chief of Ordnance set up a special
mathematical section at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. One of the
early recruits was the young Norbert Wiener, who was to feature prominently in
another research tributary of the mainstream of ballistic technology--the
automatic control of antiaircraft guns--and who was later to become one of the
creators of the new computer-related discipline of cybernetics.
..
In the 1930s, both the Aberdeen laboratory and an associated group at the
University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering obtained models of the
automatic analog computer constructed by Vannevar Bush at MIT, a gigantic
mechanical device known as the "differential analyzer." It was a marvelous aid
to calculation, but it was far from being a digital computer, in either its
design or its performance.
..
With the aid of these machines, the work of performing ballistic calculations
was somewhat relieved. Before World War II, the machines were still second to
the main resource--mathematics professors emeriti at the Moore School, who
performed the calculations by hand, with the aid of hand-cranked mechanical
calculators. Shades of Babbage's Cornish clergymen!
..
When war broke out, it was obvious that the institutions in charge of
producing ballistic calculations for several armed services needed expert help.
It was for this reason that a mobilized mathematician, Lieutenant Herman
Goldstine, reported for duty at Aberdeen in August, 1942, and was assigned the
task of streamlining ballistic computations. He soon found the Moore School
facilities inadequate, and started to expand the staff of human "computers" by
adding a large number of young women recruited from the Women's Army Corps to
the small cadre of elderly ex-professors.
..
Goldstine's wife, Adele, herself a mathematician who was to play a prominent
role in the programming of early computers (she and six other women were
eventually assigned the task of programming the ENIAC), became involved with
recruiting and teaching new staff members. Von Neumann's wife, Klara, performed
a similar role at Los Alamos, both before and after electronic computing
machines became available. The tradition of using women for such work was
widespread--the equivalent roles in Britain's code-breaking efforts were played
by hundreds of skilled calculators whom Turing and his colleagues called "girls"
as well as "computers."
..
The expansion of the human computing staff at Aberdeen to nearly two hundred
people, mostly WACs, was a stopgap measure. The calculation of firing tables was
already out of hand. As soon as a new kind of gun, fuse, or shell became
available for combat, a new table had to be calculated. The final product was
either printed in a booklet that gunners kept in their pockets, or was
mechanically encoded in special aiming apparatus called automata. (An
entirely different mathematical research effort by Julian Bigelow, Warren
Weaver, and Norbert Wiener was to concentrate on the characteristics of these
automatic aiming machines.)
..
The answer to the firing table dilemma, as Goldstine was one of the first to
recognize, was to commission the invention of an entirely new kind of mechanical
calculating aid. The Vannevar Bush calculators were no longer the most efficient
calculating devices. Faster machines, built on different principles, had been
built by Dr. Howard Aiken and an IBM team at Harvard, and by a group led by a
man named George Stibitz at Bell laboratories. But Goldstine knew that what they
really needed at Aberdeen and the Moore School was an automatic calculator that
was hundreds, even thousands of times faster than the fastest existing machines.
..
Such dreams would have been akin to an Air Force officer wishing for a
ten-thousand-mile-pre-hour airplane, except for the fact that another new
technology, one that only a few people even thought of applying to mathematical
problems, looked as if it might make such a machine possible in theory, if only
questionably probable in execution. Research in the young field of electronics
had been uncovering all sorts of marvelous properties of the vacuum tube. Over
in Great Britain, the whiz kids at Bletchley Park were using such devices in
Colossus, their not-quite-computational code-breaking machine.
..
Until the war, electronic vacuum tubes had been used almost exclusively as
amplifiers. But they could also be used as very fast switches. Since the rapid
execution of a large number of on/off impulses is the hallmark of digital
computation, and vacuum tubes could switch on and off as fast as a million times
a second, electronic switching (as opposed to the mechanical switching of
Vannevar Bush's machine) was an unbelievable good candidate for the key
component of an ultrafast computing machine.
..
By 1943, unknown to Goldstine and almost all of his superiors, another, much
higher-ranking scientist was also searching for an ultrafast computing machine.
Goldstine beat the other fellow to it. Goldstine found Mauchly and Eckert in
1942. John von Neumann, and chance, found Goldstine in 1944.
..
John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert have been properly credited with the
invention of ENIAC, but before they implemented the key ideas of electronic
digital computing machines, a man named Atanasoff in Iowa, in the 1930s, built
small, crude, but functioning prototypes of electronic calculating machines. His
name has not been as widely known, and his fortunes turned out differently from
those of other pioneers when computers grew from an exotic newborn technology to
a powerful infant industry. But in 1973 a Unites Stated district court ruled
that John Vincent Atanasoff invented the electronic digital computer.
It was a complicated decision, reached after years of litigation, and was not
as clear-cut as it might have been if both did not have such strong cases. The
core of the dispute centered around original work Atanasoff did in the 1930s,
and the influence that his work later had on John Mauchly's design of ENIAC.
Like the Hollerith-Billings story of the invention of punched-card data
processing, simple explanations of where one man's ideas left off and another's
began are difficult to reconstruct at best.
..
Atanasoff was the last of the lone inventors in the field of computation;
after him, such projects were too complicated for anything less than a team
effort. Like Boole, Atanasoff was the recipient of one of those sudden
inspirations that provided the solution to a problem he had been grappling with
for years. A theoretical physicist teaching at Iowa State in the early 1930s, he
came up against the same obstacle faced by other mathematicians and physicists
of his era. The approaches to the most interesting ideas were blocked by the
problems of performing large numbers of complex calculations.
..
By 1935, Atanasoff was in hot pursuit of a scheme to mechanize calculation.
He was aware of Babbage's ideas, but he was an electronic hobbyist as well as a
physicist, and entire technologies that didn't exist in Babbage's time were now
showing great promise. Atanasoff was gradually convinced that an electronic
computing machine was a good bet to pursue, but he had no idea how to go about
designing one, and he wasn't sure how to design a machine without working out a
method of programming it. In the late 1970s, Atanasoff told writer Katherine
Fishman:[6]
..
I commenced to go into torture. For the next two years my life was hard. I
thought and thought about this. Every evening I would go into my office in the
physics building. One night in the winter of 1937 my whole body was in torment
from trying to solve the problems of the machine. I got in my car and drove at
high speeds for a long while so I could control my emotions. It was my habit
to do this for a few miles: I could gain control of myself by concentrating on
driving. But that night I was excessively tormented, and I kept on going until
I had crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois and was 189 miles from where
I started. I knew I had to quit; I saw a light, which turned out to be a
roadhouse, and I went in. It was probably zero outside, and I remember hanging
up my heavy coat; I started to drink and commenced to warm up and realized
that I had control of myself.
..
Nearly forty years later, when he testified in the patent case concerning the
invention of the electronic computer, Atanasoff recalled that he decided upon
several design elements and principles that night in the roadhouse--including a
binary system for encoding input and electronic tube technology for
switching--that would transform his dream of an electronic calculator into a
practical plan.
..
The state of each inventor's mind at the time of their discussions in 1940
and 1941 was the crux of the legal and historical conflict. There is no dispute
that John Mauchly had also devoted years of thought of the idea of automated
calculation. Thirty-three years old when he met Atanasoff, Mauchly had worked
his way through Johns Hopkins as a research assistant, which gave him extensive
experience with procedures that involve detailed measurement and calculation. In
1933, as head of the physics department at Ursinus College near Philadelphia, he
began to perform research in atmospheric electricity.
..
Mauchly was particularly interested in the long-disputed theory about the
effect of sunspots on the earth's weather. There was no obvious connection
between these huge storms on the sun and terrestrial weather conditions, but
that did not prove that such a connection did not exist. In 1936, Mauchly
arranged to have many parts of the government's voluminous meteorological
records shipped back to his office at Ursinus. He intended to apply modern
statistical analysis to the weather data in an attempt to correlate them with
records of sunspot activity, hoping that this probe would reveal the previously
undetected pattern.
..
As other mathematical meteorologists like von Neumann were also quickly
discovering, Mauchly found that any calculations involving data based on weather
quickly grew so complicated that it would take a lifetime to calculate all the
equations generated from even the shortest periods of observation. So he found
himself doing the same thing that the ballistics experts did--hiring a lot of
people with adding machines. A Depression-era agency, the National Youth
Administration, helped Mauchly pay students fifty cents an hour to tabulate his
weather data with hand calculators. Mauchly planned to obtain punched-card
machines, once he got his crew to tackle the first part of the data. But when he
watched a demonstration of the world's most advanced punched-card tabulator at
the 1939 World's Fair, he realized that even scores of such machines in the
hands of trained operators might take another decade to go through the weather
data.
..
In 1939 and 1940, Mauchly read in scientific journals about a new measuring
and counting system developed to assist cosmic-ray research. The part of the
system that caught his eye was the fact that this new device, using electronic
circuits, could count cosmic rays far faster than a dozen of the fasted
punched-card tabulators. Cosmic rays can be detected at the rate of thousands
per second, but all previous recorders failed to keep pace beyond 500 times a
second. Mauchly tried making a few electronic circuits for himself, and he began
to see a way that they could be used for computation.
..
Mauchly took note of one circuit in particular that was developed by the
cosmic-ray researchers--the coincidence circuit, in which a switch
would be closed only when several signals arrived at exactly the same time,
thus, in effect, rendering a decision. Would a machine capable of making
electronic logical operations be possible via some variation of this circuit?
Experimenting with his own vacuum-tube circuits, Mauchly speculated that there
might also exist circuits used in other kinds of instruments that would enable
him to build a machine to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. At this point his
speculations were more grandiose than his hand-wired prototypes, but the clues
he had obtained from the cosmic-ray researchers were enough to put Mauchly's
weather-predicting machines on a collision course with a certain device the U.S.
Army had in mind, one that had nothing to do with sunspots or the weather.
..
Mauchly brought a small analog device to the AAAS meeting where he met
Atanasoff, and in June, 1941, he hitched a ride to visit Atanasoff in Ames,
Iowa. Atanasoff demonstrated the ABC, Mauchly stayed for five days, and
thirty-two years later a court decided that Mauchly's later invention of the
ENIAC relied upon key ideas of Atanasoff's that were transferred from mind those
five days in June.
..
The 1973 legal decision (Honeywell versus Sperry Rand, U.S. District
Court, District of Minnesota, Fourth Division) did not state that Mauchly stole
anything, but did restore partial credit for the invention of the electronic
computer to a man whose name had been nearly forgotten in all the publicity and
honors heaped upon Mauchly and Eckert. After the ruling, Mauchly said: "I feel I
got nothing out of that visit to Atanasoff except the royal shaft later."[7] On
Mauchly's behalf, it must be noted that nobody has disputed the fact that the
sheer scale and engineering audacity of ENIAC was far beyond the ABC, and that
Mauchly was indeed on the right track at least as early as Atanasoff.
..
Part of the reason for ENIAC's success and ABC's obscurity must be attributed
to the accidents of history. Legal issues aside, the historical momentum shifted
to Mauchly later in the summer of 1941, when he signed up for an Army-sponsored
electronics course at the Moore School of Engineering. His instructor, J.
Presper Eckert, was an exceptionally bright Philadelphia blueblood twelve years
younger than Mauchly. When Eckert, the electronics wizard, learned of Mauchly's
plan to automate large-scale numerical calculations, a critical mass of
idea-power was reached. They were in exactly the right place at the right time
to cook up such an ambitious project.
..
Not long after thirty-four-year-old John Mauchly and twenty-two-year-old Pres
Eckert started to sketch out a plan for an electronic computer, they became
acquainted with Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, both as a mathematician and as a
liaison officer between the Moore School and the Ballistic Research Laboratory.
By the time he met them, Goldstine was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of
ballistic computing power that he was receptive to even a science-fiction story
like the one presented to him by these two whiz kids.
..
As wild as it sounded as an engineering feat, Goldstine knew that an
electronic device such as the one Mauchly and Eckert described to him had the
potential to perform ballistic calculations over 1000 times faster than the best
existing machine, the Aiken-IBM-Harvard-Navy device called the Mark I. But it
would cost a lot of money to find out if they were right. Atanasoff and Berry
built their prototype for a total of $6500. These boys would need hundreds of
thousands of dollars to lash together something so complicated and delicate that
most electrical engineers of the time would swear it could never work.
..
Goldstine later explained the risks associated with attempting the proposed
electronic calculator project:[8]
..
. . . we should realize that the proposed machine turned out to contain
over 17,000 tubes of 16 different types operating at a fundamental clock rate
of 100,000 pulses per second. . . . once every 10 microseconds an error would
occur if a single one of the 17,000 tubes operated incorrectly; this means
that in a single second there were 1.7 billion . . . chances of a failure
occurring . . . Man has never made an instrument capable of operating with
this degree of fidelity or reliability, and this is why the undertaking was so
risky a one and the accomplishment so great.
..
The two young would-be computer inventors at the Moore School, the
mathematician-turned-lieutenant who found them, and their audacious plan for
cutting through the calculation problem by creating the world's most complicated
machine were the subject of a high-level meeting on April 9, 1943. Attending was
one of the original founders of the military's mathematical research effort and
President of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Oswald Veblen, as
well as Colonel Leslie Simon, director of the Ballistic Research Laboratory, and
Goldstine.
..
The moment when the United States War Department entered the age-old quest
for a computing machine, and thus made the outcome inevitable, was recalled by
Goldstine when he wrote, nearly thirty years later, that Veblen, "after
listening for a short while to my presentation and teetering on the back legs of
his chair brought the chair down with a crash, arose, and said, 'Simon, give
Goldstine the money.'"[9] They got their money--eventually as much as
$400,000--and started building their machine.
..
ENIAC was monstrous--100 feet long, 10 feet high, 3 feet deep, weighing 30
tons--and hot enough to keep the room temperature up toward 120 degrees F while
it shunted multivariable differential equations through its more than 17,000
tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 hand-set switches. It used
an enormous amount of power--the apocryphal story is that the lights of
Philadelphia dimmed when it was plugged in.
..
When it was finally completed, ENIAC was too late to use in the war, but it
certainly delivered what its inventors had promised: a ballistic calculation
that would have taken twenty hours for a skilled human calculator could be
accomplished by the machine in less than thirty seconds. For the first time, the
trajectory of a shell could be calculated in less time than it took an actual
shell to travel to its target. But the firing tables were no longer the biggest
boom on the block by the time ENIAC was completed. The first problem run on the
machine, late in the winter of 1945, was a trial calculation for the hydrogen
bomb then being designed.
..
After his first accidental meeting with Goldstine at Aberdeen, and the
demonstration of a prototype ENIAC soon afterward, von Neumann joined the Moore
School project as a special consultant. Johnny's genius for formal, systematic,
logical thinking was applied to the logical properties of this huge maze of
electronic circuits. The engineering problems were still formidable, but it was
becoming clear that the nonphysical component, the subtleties of setting up the
machine's operations--the coding, as they began to call it--was equally
difficult and important.
..
Until the transistor came along a few years later, ENIAC would represent the
physical upper limit of what could be done with a large number of high-speed
switches. In 1945, the most promising approach to greater computing power was in
improving the logical structure of the machine. And von Neumann was probably the
one man west of Bletchley Park equipped to understand the logical attributes of
the first digital computer.
..
Part of the reason ENIAC was able to operate so fast was that the routes
followed by the electronic impulses were wired into the machine. This electronic
routing was the materialization of the machine's instructions for transforming
the input data into the solution. Many different kinds of equations could be
solved, and the performance of a calculation could be altered by the outcome of
subproblems, but ENIAC was nowhere near as flexible as Babbage's Analytical
Engine, which could be reprogrammed to solve a different set of equations, not
by altering the machine itself, but by altering the sequence of input cards.
..
What Mauchly and Eckert gained in calculating power and speed, they paid for
in overall flexibility. The gargantuan electronic machine had to be set up for
solving each separate problem by changing the configuration of a huge
telephone-like switchboard, a procedure that could take days. The origins of the
device as a ballistics project were partially responsible for this
inflexibility. It was not the intention of the Moore School engineers to build a
universal machine. Their contract quite clearly specified that they create an
altogether new kind of trajectory calculator.
..
Especially after von Neumann joined the team, they realized that what they
were constructing would not only become the ultimate mathematical calculator,
but the first, necessarily imperfect prototype of a whole new category of
machine. Before ENIAC was completed, its designers were already planning a
successor. Von Neumann, especially, began to realize that what they were talking
about was a general-purpose machine, one that was by its nature
particularly well suited to function as an extension of the human mind.
..
If one thing was sacred to Johnny, it was the power of human thought to
penetrate the mysteries of the universe, and the will of human beings to apply
that knowledge to practical ends. He had other things on his own mind at the
time--from the secrets of H-bomb design to the structure of logic machines--but
he appeared to be most keen on the idea that these devices might evolve into
some kind of intellectual extension. How much more might a thinker like himself
accomplish with the aid of such a machine? One biographer put it this way:[10]
..
Von Neumann's enthusiasm in 1944 and 1945 had first been generated by the
challenge of improving the general-purpose computer. He had been a proponent
of using the latest in computing machines in the atomic bomb project, but he
realized that for the impending hydrogen bomb project still better and faster
machines were needed. In the theoretical level he was intrigued by the fact
that there appeared to be organizational parallels between the brain and
computers and that these parallels might lead to formal-logic theories
encompassing both computers and brains; moreover, the logical theories would
constitute interesting abstract logics in their own right. He was cautious in
assuming similarity between a computer and the awesome functioning of the
human brain, especially as in 1944 he had little preparation in physiology.
Rather he regarded the computer as a technical device functioning as an
extension of its user; it would lead to an aggrandizement of the human brain,
and von Neumann wanted to push this aggrandizement as far and as fast as
possible.
..
There is no dispute that Mauchly, Eckert, Goldstine, and Von Neumann worked
together as a team during this crucial gestation period of computer technology.
The team split up in 1946, however, so the matter of accrediting specific ideas
has become a sticky one. Memoranda were written, as they are on any project,
without the least expectation that years later they would be regarded as
historical or legal documents. Technology was moving too fast for the
traditional process of peer review and publication: the two most important
documents from these early days were titled "First Draft . . ." and "Preliminary
Report . . ."
..
By the time they got around to sketching the design for the next electronic
computer, the four main ENIAC designers had agreed that the goal was to design a
machine that would use the same hardware technology in a more efficient way. The
next step, the invention of stored programming, is where the
accreditation controversy comes in. At the end of June, 1945, the ENIAC team
prepared a proposal in the form of a "First Draft of a Report on the Electronic
Discrete Variable Calculator" (EDVAC). It was signed by von Neumann, but
reflected the conclusions of the group. Goldstine later said of this: "It has
been said by some that von Neumann did not give credits in his First
Draft to others. The reason for this was that the document was document was
intended by von Neumann as a working paper for use in clarifying and
coordinating the thinking of the group and was not intended for publication."[11]
(Mauchly and Eckert, however, took a less benign view of von Neumann's
intentions.) The most significant innovations articulated in this paper involved
the logical aspects of coding, as well as dealing with the engineering of the
physical device that was to follow the coded instructions.
..
Creating the coded instructions for a new computation on ENIAC was nowhere
near as time consuming as carrying out the calculation by hand. Once the code
for the instructions needed to carry out the calculation had been drawn up, all
that had to be done to perform the computation on any set of input data was to
properly configure the machine to perform the instructions. The calculation,
which formerly took up the most time, had become trivial, but a new bottleneck
was created with the resetting of switches, a process that took an unreasonable
amount of time compared with the length of time it would take to run the
calculation.
..
Resetting the switches was the most worrisome bottleneck, but not the only
one. The amount of time it took for the instructions to make use of the data,
although greatly reduced from the era of manual calculation, was also
significant--in ballistics, the ultimate goal of automating calculation was to
be able to predict the path of a missile before it landed, not days or
hours or even just minutes later. If only there was a more direct way for the
different sets of instructions--the inflexible, slow-to-change- component of the
computing system--to interact with the data stored in the electronic memory, the
more quickly accessible component of computation. The solution, as von Neumann
and colleagues formulated it, was an innovation based upon a logicel
breakthrough.
..
The now-famous "First Draft" described the logical properties of a true
general-purpose electronic digital computer. In one key passage, the EDVAC draft
pointed out something that Babbage, if not Turing, had overlooked: "The device
requires a considerable memory. While it appeared that various parts of this
memory have to perform functions which differ somewhat in their nature and
considerably in their purpose, it is nevertheless tempting to treat the entire
memory as one organ."[12] In other words, a general-purpose computer should be
able to store instructions in its internal memory, along with data.
..
What used to be a complex configuration of switchboard settings could be
symbolized by the programmer in the form of a number and read by the computer as
the location of an instruction stored in memory, an instruction that would
automatically be applied to specified data that was also stored in memory. This
meant that the program could call up other programs, and even modify other
programs, without intervention by the human operator. Suddenly, with this simple
change, true information processing became possible.
..
This is the kernel of the concept of stored programming, and although the
ENIAC were officially the first to describe an electronic computing device in
such terms, it should be noted that the abstract version of exactly the same
idea was proposed in Alan Turing's 1936 paper in the form of the single tape of
the universal Turing machine. And at the same time the Pennsylvania group was
putting together the EDVAC report, Turing was thinking again about the concept
of stored programs:[13]
..
So the spring of 1945 saw the ENIAC team on one hand, and Alan Turing on
the other, arrive naturally at the idea of constructing a universal machine
with a single "tape." . . .
..
But when Alan Turing spoke of "building a brain," he was working and
thinking alone in his spare time, pottering around in a British back garden
shed with a few pieces of equipment grudgingly conceded by the secret service.
He was not being asked to provide the solution to numerical problems such as
those von Neumann was engaged upon; he had been thinking for himself. He had
simply put together things that no one had put together before: his one tape
universal Turing machine, the knowledge that large scale pulse technology
could work, and the experience of turning cryptanalytic thought into "definite
methods" and "mechanical processes." Since 1939 he had been concerned with
little but symbols, states, and instruction tables--and with the problem of
embodying these as effectively as possible in concrete forms.
..
With the EDVAC design, ballistics calculators took the first step
toward general-purpose computers, and it became clear to a few people that such
devices would surely evolve into something far more powerful. The kind of uses
the inventors envisioned for the future of their technology was a cause for one
of several major theoretical disagreements that were to surface soon thereafter
among the four ENIAC principals. Von Neumann and Goldstine saw the opportunity
to build an incredibly powerful research tool for scientists and mathematicians.
Mauchly and Eckert were already thinking of business and government applications
outside military or research institutions.
..
The first calculation run on ENIAC in December, 1945, six months after the
"First Draft," was a problem posed by scientists from Los Alamos Laboratories.
ENIAC was formally dedicated in February, 1946. By then, the patriotic
solidarity enforced upon the research team by wartime conditions had faded away.
Von Neumann was enthusiastic about the military and scientific future of the
computer-building enterprise, but the two young men who had dreamed up the
computer project before the big brass stepped in were getting other ideas about
how their brain-child ought to mature. The tensions between institutions,
people, and ideas mounted until Mauchly and Eckert left the Moors School on
March 31, 1946, over a dispute with the university concerning patent rights top
ENIAC. They founded their own group shortly thereafter, eventually naming it
The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
..
When Mauchly and Eckert later suggested that they were, in fact, the sole
originators of the EDVAC report, they were, in Goldstine's phrase, "strenuously
opposed" by Goldstine and von Neumann. The split turned out to be a lifelong
feud. Goldstine, writing in 1972 from his admittedly partial perspective, was
unequivocal in pointing out von Neumann's contributions:[14]
..
First, his entire summary as a unit constitutes a major contribution and
had a profound impact not only on the EDVAC but also served as a model for
virtually all future studies of logical design. Second, in that report he
introduced a logical notion adapted from one of McCulloch and Pitts, who used
it in a study of the nervous system. This notation became widely used, and is
still, in modified form, an important and indeed essential way for describing
pictorially how computer circuits behave from a logical point of view.
..
Third, in the famous report he proposed a repertoire of instructions for
the EDVAC, and in a subsequent letter he worked out a detailed programming for
a sort and merge routine. This represents a milestone, since it is
the first elucidation of the now famous stored program concept together with a
completely worked-out illustration.
..
Fourth, he set forth clearly the serial mode of operation of the modern
computer, i.e., one instruction at a time is inspected and then executed. This
is in sharp distinction to the parallel operation of the ENIAC in which many
things are simultaneously performed.
..
While Mauchly and Eckert set forth to establish the commercial applications
of computer technology, Goldstine, von Neumann, and another mathematician by the
name of Arthur Burks put together a proposal and presented it to the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Radio Corporation of America, and the Army
Ordnance Department, requesting one million dollars to build an advanced
electronic digital computer. Once again, some of the thinking in this project
was an extension of the group creations of the ENIAC project. But this
"Preliminary Discussion," unquestionably dominated by von Neumann, also went
boldly beyond the EDVAC conception as it was stated in the "First Draft."
..
Although the latest proposal was aimed at the construction of a machine that
would be more sophisticated than EDVAC, the authors went much farther than
describing a particular machine. They very strongly suggested that their
specification should be of the general plan for the logical structure and
fundamental method of operation for all future computers. They were right: it
took almost forty years, until the 1980s until anyone made a serious attempt to
build "non-von Neumann machines."
..
"Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing
Instrument," which has since been recognized as the founding document of the
modern science of electronic computer design, was submitted on June 28, 1946,
but was available only in the form of mimeographed copies of the original report
to the Ordnance Department until 1962, when a condensed version was published in
Datamation magazine.[15]
The primary contributions of this document were related to the logical use of
the memory mechanism and the overall plan of what has been come to be known as
the "logical architecture." One aspect of this architecture was the ingenious
way data and instructions were made to be changeable during the course of a
computation without requiring direct intervention by the human operator.
..
This changeability was accomplished by treating numerical data as "values"
that could be assigned to specific locations in memory. The basic memory
component of an EDVAC-type computer used collections of memory elements known as
"registers" to store numerical values in the form of a series of on/off
impulses. Each of these numbers was assigned an "address" in the memory, and any
address could contain either data or an instruction. In this way, specific data
and instructions could be located when needed by the control unit. One result of
this was that a particular piece of data could be a variable--like the
x in algebra--that could be changed independently by having the results
of an operation stored at the appropriate address, or by telling the computer to
perform an operation on whatever was found at that location.
..
One of the characteristics of any series of computation instructions is a
reference to data: when the instructions tell the machine how to perform a
calculation, they have to specify what data to plug into the calculation. By
making the reference to data a reference to the contents of a specific memory
location, instead of a reference to a specific number, it became possible for
the data to change during the course of a computation, according to the results
of earlier steps. It is in this way that the numbers stored in the memory can
become symbolic of quantities other than just numerical value, in the same way
that algebra enables one to manipulate symbols like x and y
without specifying the values.
..
It is easier to visualize the logic of this schema if you think of the memory
addresses as something akin to numbered cubbyholes or post-office boxes--each
address is nothing but a place to find a message. The addresses serve as easily
located containers for the (changeable) values (the "messages") to be found
inside them. Box #1, for example, might contain a number; box #2 might contain
another number; box #3 might contain instructions for an arithmetic operation to
be performed on the numbers found in boxes #1 and #2; box #4 might contain the
operation specified in box #3. The numbers in the first two boxes might be fixed
numbers, or they might be variables, the values of which might depend on the
result of other operations.
..
By putting both the instructions and the raw data inside the same memory, it
became possible to perform computations much faster than with ENIAC, but it also
became necessary to devise a way to clearly indicate to the machine that some
specific addresses contain instructions and other addresses contain numbers for
those instructions to operate on.
..
In the "First Draft," von Neumann specified that each instruction should be
designated in the coding of a program by a number that begins with the digit 1,
and each of the numbers (data) should begin with the digit 0. The "Preliminary
Report" expanded the means of distinguishing instructions from data by stating
that computers would keep these two categories of information separate by
operating during two different time cycles, as well.
..
All the instructions are executed according to a timing scheme based on the
ticking of a built-in clock. The "instruction" cycles and "execution cycles
alternate: On "tick," the machine's control unit interprets numbers brought to
it as instructions, and prepares to execute the operations specified by the
instructions on "tock," when the "execution" cycle begins and the control unit
interprets input as data to operate upon.
..
The plan for this new category of general-purpose computer not only specified
a timing scheme but set down what has become known as the "architecture" of the
computer--the division of logical functions among physical components. The
scheme had similarities to both Babbage's and Turing's models. All such
machines, the authors of the "Preliminary Report" declared, must have a unit
where arithmetic and logical operations can be performed (the processing unit
where actual calculation takes place, equivalent to Babbage's "mill"), a unit
where instructions and data for the current problem can be stored (like
Babbage's "store," a kind of temporary memory device), a unit that executes the
instructions according to the specified sequential order (like the "read/write
head" of Turing's theoretical machine), and a unit where the human operator can
enter raw information or see the computed output (what we now call "input-output
devices").
..
Any machine that adheres to these principles--no matter what physical
technology is used to implement these logical functions--is an example of what
has become known as "the von Neumann architecture." It doesn't matter whether
you build such a machine out of gears and springs, vacuum tubes, or transistors,
as long as its operations follow this logical sequence. This theoretical
template was first implemented in the Unites States at the Institute for
Advanced Study. Modified copies of the IAS machine were made for the Rand
Corporation, an Air Force spinoff "think tank" that was responsible for keeping
track of targets for the nation's new but fast-growing nuclear armory, and for
the Los Alamos Laboratory. Against von Neumann's mild objections, the Rand
machine was dubbed JOHNNIAC. The Los Alamos machine assigned to nuclear
weapons-related calculations was given the strangely uneuphemistic name of
MANIAC.
..
(Neither EDVAC, the IAS machine, the Los Alamos, not the Rand machine was the
first operational example of a fully functioning stored-program computer.
British computer builders, who had been pursuing parallel research and who were
aware of Von Neumann's ideas, beat the Americans when it came to constructing a
machine based on the logical principles enunciated by von Neumann. The first
machine that was binary, serial, and used stored-program memory was EDSAC--the
Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, built at the University
Mathematical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England.)
..
In a von Neumann machine, the arithmetic and logic unit is where the basic
operations of the system are wired in. All the other instructions are
constructed out of these fundamentals. It is possible, in principle, to build a
device of this type with very few, extremely simple, built-in operations.
Addition, for example, could be performed over and over again whenever a
multiplication operation is requested by a program. In fact, the only two
operations that are absolutely necessary are "not" and "and." The problem with
using a few very simple hardwired operations and proportionally complex software
structures built from them is that it slows down the operation of the computer:
Because instructions are executed one at a time ("serially") as the internal
clock ticks, the number of basic instructions in a program dictates how long it
takes a computer to run that program.
..
The control unit specified by the "Preliminary Report"--the component that
supervises the execution of instructions--was the materialization of the formal
logic device created by Emil L. Post and Turing, who had proved that it was
possible to devise codes in terms of numbers that could cause a machine to solve
any problem that was clearly statable. This is where the symbol meets the
signal, where sequences of on and off impulses in the circuits, the Xs and Os on
the cells of the endless tape, the strings of numbers in the programmer's code,
marry the human-created computation to the machine that computes.
..
The input-output devices were the parts of the system that were to advance
the most slowly while the switch-based memory, arithmetic, and control
components ascended through orders of magnitude. For over a decade after ENIAC,
punched cards were the main input devices, and for over two decades, teletype
machines were the most common output devices.
..
The possibility of future breakthroughs in this area and their implications
were not overlooked. In a memorandum written in November, 1945, concerning on of
the early proposals for the IAS machine, von Neumann anticipated the possibility
of creating a more visually oriented output device:[16]
..
In many cases the output really desired is not digital (presumably
printed) but pictorial (graphed). In such situations the machine should graph
it directly, especially because graphing can be done electronically and hence
more quickly than printing. The natural output in such a case is an
oscilloscope, i.e., a picture on its fluorescent screen. In some cases these
pictures are wanted for permanent storage . . . in others only visual
inspection is desired. Both alternatives should be provided for.
..
But a personal interactive computer, helpful as such a device might
be to a mind such as von Neumann's, was not an interesting enough problem. After
solving interesting problems about the processes that take place in the heart of
stars, a scientific-technological tour de force that also became a historical
point of no return when the scientists' employers demonstrated their creation at
Hiroshima, and then solving another set of problems concerned with the creation
of computing machinery, all the while pontificating about the most potent
aspects of foreign policy to the leaders of the most powerful nation in history,
John von Neumann was aiming for nothing less than the biggest secret of all. In
the late 1940s and early 1950s, the most interesting scientific question of the
day was "what is life?"
..
To someone who had been at Alamogordo and the Moore School, it would not have
been too farfetched to believe that the next intellectual conquest might bring
the secret of physical immorality within reach. Certainly he would never know
whether he could truly resolve the most awesome of nature's mysteries until he
set his mind to decoding the secret of life. And that he did.
Characteristically, von Neumann focused on the aspect of the mystery of life
that appealed to his dearest instincts and most powerful capacities--the pure,
logical, mathematical underpinnings of nature's code. He was particularly
interested in the logical properties of the theoretical devices known as
automata, of which Turing's machine was an example.
..
Von Neumann was especially drawn to the idea of self-reporducing
automata--mathematical patterns in space and time that had the property of being
able to reproduce themselves. He was able to draw on his knowledge of computers,
his growing understanding of neurophysiology and biology, and make particularly
good use of his deep understanding of logic, because he saw self-replicating
automata as essentially logical beasts. The way the task was accomplished by
living organism of the type found on earth was only one way it could be done. In
principle, the task could be done by a machine that could follow a plan, because
the plan, and not the mechanism that carried it out, was a part of the system
with the special, heretofore mysterious property that distinguished life from
nonliving matter.
..
Von Neumann approached "cellular automata" on an abstract level, just as
Turing did with his first machines. As early as 1948, he showed that any
self-replicating system must have raw materials, a program that provides
instructions, an automaton that follows the instructions and arranges the
symbols in the cells of a Turing-type machine, a system for duplicating
instructions, and a supervisory unit--which turned out to be an excellent
description of the DNA direction of protein synthesis in living cells.
..
Another thing that interested Johnny was the gamelike aspect of the world.
Accordingly, he thought about the way his self-reproducing automaton was like a
game:[17]
..
Making use of the work done by his colleague Stanislav Ulam, von Neumann
was able to refine his calculations and make them more generally applicable.
Von Neumann's mental experiment, which we can easily present in the form of a
game, makes use of a homogeneous space subdivided by cells. We can think of
these cells as squares on a playing board. A finite number of states--e.g.,
empty, occupied, or occupied by a specific color--is assigned to a square. At
the same time, a neighborhood is defined for each cell. This neighborhood can
consist of either the for orthogonally bordering cells or the eight
orthogonally and diagonally bordering cells. In the space divided up this way,
transition rules are applied simultaneously to each cell. The transition any
particular cell undergoes will depend on its state and on the states of its
neighbors. Von Neumann was able to prove that a configuration of about 200,000
cells, each with 29 different possible states and each placed in a
neighborhood of 4 orthogonally adjacent squares, could meet all the
requirements of a self-reproducing automaton. The large number of elements was
necessary because von Neumann's model was also designed to simulate a Turing
machine. Von Neumann's machine can, theoretically, perform any mathematical
operation.
..
In 1950, when it was evident to all that the engineering phase of computer
technology was accomplishing impressive tasks, von Neumann postulated one such
system in terms of a factory that contains within it the machinery and the
detailed blueprints for making identical factories (and identical blueprints)
from raw materials provided to it. Take that a step up in complexity, and the
details can include a specification for subsystems that find raw materials for
the factory from the environment, with no human intervention.
..
If one fantasizes one step farther on the complexity spectrum, the
instructions and capabilities could specify factories capable of building
spaceships to send more spaceships to other planets, where the raw materials
found would be shaped into more factory-spaceship-launchpad systems, and if you
could build factories that could build two or more such complexes, you
could have a counterforce to the generally disorderly trend of the cosmos, in
the form of a (mindless?) horde of factory-building factories, munching outward
through the galaxies like an anti-entropic swarm of logical locusts.
..
While it definitely sounds like a science-fiction story, and many would add
that it could be interpreted to be an idea of such inhuman coldness as to be
termed "fiendish" such scenarios are legitimate topics in the field of automata,
and are still known as "von Neumann machines" (as distinguished from "the von
Neumann machine," the logical architecture he created for digital computers).
..
Von Neumann died in 1957, before he could achieve a breakthrough in the field
of automata. Like Ada, he died of cancer, and like Ada, he was said to have
suffered terribly, as much from the loss of his intellectual facilities as from
pain. But the world he left behind him was powerfully rearranged by what he had
accomplished before he failed to solve his last, perhaps most interesting
problem.
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