Computing Pioneer Dies
Noel Chiappa
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Nov 10 20:16:18 CST 2017
> From: Dave Wade
> ENIAC had been configured in stored program mode earlier in the year
> and had run a program stored in the function switches, e.g. ROM
> ...
> Despite the fact that when running stored programs ENIAC's parallel
> processing features were not available, it was exclusively in this mode
> from 1948 onwards.
This may have been mentioned here already, but if not, there's a good new
book out which covers this phase of ENIAC's existence in considerable detail:
Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope, "ENIAC In Action: Making and
Remaking the Modern Computer", MIT Press, Cambridge, 2016
It's a very interesting and well-done book; I highly recommend it.
> From: Brent Hilpert
> The best that can be said for your position is that you (and the
> ENIAC/Mauchlyite crowd) have a particular opinion and definition
> regarding 'stored-program computer'.
I'm harly a member of the "ENIAC/Mauchlyite crowd" (in fact, I used to not
have a good impression of them at all), but I thought Haigh et al made a
pretty good case.
Noel
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