The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Assessing this implosion concept required solving a swarm of equations that could calculate the rate of flow of the compression of air or other material that would occur after an explosion. Thus von Neuma

During the summer of 1944, this quest took him to Bell Labs to study the updated versions of George Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator. The latest one had an i

At Harvard, Grace Hopper and her programming partner, Richard Bloch, set up a place for von Neuma

Von Neuma

The problem von Neuma

Thus he was primed to be part of the next big advance: the development of a stored-memory computer. So it was fortuitous that, in late August 1944, he had an encounter on the platform of the train station of the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

VON NEUMANN AT PENN

Captain Herman Goldstine, the Army liaison who was working with Mauchly and Eckert on the ENIAC, happened to be on the same platform at Aberdeen waiting for the train north. He had never met von Neuma

At Goldstine’s behest, von Neuma

ENIAC could solve in less than an hour a partial differential equation that would take Harvard’s Mark I close to eighty hours. That impressed von Neuma

Von Neuma

Von Neuma

Von Neuma