ENIAC ....

On 2011 Jan 25, at 6:09 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote: We're talking about the ENIAC, not the EDVAC. TMU, ENIAC was already under design and construction when von Neumann became aware of it. The question is not did they know about Turing, rather did they know about Turing-completeness. Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" (it's on the web) was highly abstract and in the realm of theory and the philosophy of logic at the time, a long ways from people building calculating machines. The paper was directed at other issues (note title) not characterising machine architectures. I don't know the exact history of the theoretical developments, but I suspect the notion of Turing-completeness came later, a derivation from the paper. I really don't think people were going around trying to characterise their implementations as Turing-complete at the time of the ENIAC. I really don't see E & M thinking "We must ensure the ENIAC has the functionality to make it Turing-complete." Frankly, it sounds ludicrous. One way or the other if people are going to make such claims as in w'pedia it's for them to show them, not others to disprove them. I did a search for "ENIAC Turing complete". All I've seen so far is limpid statements of claim, such as: "ENIAC also differed from earlier calculating devices in that it was designed and used to be Turing-complete - that is, a truly universal computing device" Which just from the phrasing suggests the person writing it doesn't know what they are talking about. It's been sometime since I went looking for stuff on the 'first computer'/ENIAC/ABC topic on the web. Man, there is a lot of crap out there (and it's not limited to ENIAC supporters).