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Information about First Draft Of A Report On The Edvac

The First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (commonly shortened to First Draft) was an incomplete 101-page document written by John von Neumann and distributed on June 30, 1945 by Herman Goldstine, security officer on the classified ENIAC project. It contains the first published description of the logical design of a computer using the stored-program concept, which has come to be known as the von Neumann architecture.

The title page of the report reads:

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
by John von Neumann,
Contract No. W-670-ORD-4926,
Between the United States Army Ordnance Department
and the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
June 30, 1945


Von Neumann wrote the report by hand while commuting by train to Los Alamos, New Mexico and mailed the handwritten notes back to Philadelphia. Goldstine had the report typed and duplicated. While the date on the typed report is June 30, 24 copies of the First Draft were distributed to persons closely connected with the EDVAC project five days earlier on June 25. Interest in the report caused it to be sent all over the world; Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University cited his excitement over the report's content as the impetus for his decision to travel to the United States for the Moore School Lectures in Summer 1946.

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. 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.)

External links

References

  • Goldstine, Herman H. (1972). The Computer: from Pascal to von Neumann. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02367-0. 
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was a stored program machine.
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unfinished work is a creative work that has not been completed. Its creator might have chosen never to finish it, or have been prevented by circumstances outside of his or her control (including death).
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John von Neumann

John von Neumann in the 1940s
Born November 28 1903(1903--)
Budapest, Austria-Hungary
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June 30 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

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Herman Heine Goldstine (September 13, 1913 – June 16, 2004), mathematician, computer scientist and scientific administrator, was a one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.
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ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer,[1] was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems,[2]
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von Neumann architecture is a computer design model that uses a processing unit and a single separate storage structure to hold both instructions and data. It is named after mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann.
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June 25 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

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University of Cambridge (often Cambridge University), located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and has a reputation as one of the world's most prestigious universities.
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Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic Digital Computers (popularly called the "Moore School Lectures") was a course in the construction of electronic digital computers held at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between
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EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was a stored program machine.
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University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn[3][4]) is a private, coeducational research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to the university, it is America's first university[5] and is the fourth-oldest
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The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania came into existence as a result of an endowment from Alfred Fitler Moore on June 4, 1923. It was granted to the Penn's School of Electrical Engineering, located in the Towne Building.
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Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος logos; meaning word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle) is the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration.
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The term "Matthew effect" may refer, depending on context, to a number of ideas all related to a parable in the Gospel of Matthew:

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The "Matthew effect
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Herman Heine Goldstine (September 13, 1913 – June 16, 2004), mathematician, computer scientist and scientific administrator, was a one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.
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