27 Feb
2015
27 Feb
'15
10:58 p.m.
On 2015-Feb-27, at 1:44 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote:
Tom stated (in an email last fall): "we do conclude that an entirely practical
version of the programming method described in the seminal 1945 First Draft of a Report on
the EDVAC was implemented on ENIAC in March-April 1948, some months before the Manchester
?Baby? ran what has usually been considered the first modern program."
And as they present in the articles, the "programming method described" is not
the be-all-and-end-all of the First Draft and it is not the von Neumann architecture nor
the stored-program concept.
Their
work resulted in three recent academic papers and a new book coming soon, in which they
clearly found that ENIAC was up-and-running in stored-program configuration a short time
before the Manchester and any other computers: www.eniacinaction.com.
The authors
of the articles carefully avoid declarations of ENIAC as a stored-program machine.