Abstract
We revisit the origins of the modern, so-called “stored program” computer during the 1940s from a media-centric viewpoint, from tape-driven relay computers to the introduction of delay line and cathode ray tube memories. Some early machines embodied fixed programs, but all general-purpose computers use a medium of some kind to store control information. The idea of a “memory space” composed of sequentially numbered “storage locations” is crucial to modern computing, but we show that this idea developed incrementally and was not fully articulated in John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. Instead, the designers of computers based around delay line memories conceptualized their structure using different temporal and spatial schemes. Referencing the correct data was not just a question of “where” but also one of “when.”
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Copeland has in fact produced an excellent study of early tube-based memory devices (Copeland et al. 2017), but this engagement with materiality does not appear to have altered his conviction that Alan Turing invented the “stored program computer” in 1936.
- 3.
In Haigh et al. (2016), we attributed this work to Burks, but subsequent archival research has revealed the importance of Goldstine’s contribution.
- 4.
Mark II could be operated as one large machine or split to allow independent problems to be computed simultaneously on its two “sides.”
- 5.
This paragraph is based on the account given in (Burks n.d.).
- 6.
The tapes of Turing’s abstract machines of 1936 were accessed in a similar way: temporary marks were left in squares adjacent to the squares holding data of interest and later “hunted” for.
- 7.
These ordered pairs were written, problematically from a typist’s point of view, μρ in the First Draft.
- 8.
It became common for machines using delay lines or magnetic drums as their primary memory to include an additional address to code the location of the next instruction, thus allowing optimum coding . However, that was not the only motivation. EDVAC’s designer (Lubkin 1947) justified the additional address by saying it would make programs easier to change, not as a way to improve operational efficiency.
- 9.
See the detailed discussion in von Neumann (1945 , pp. 73–78). It is a curiosity that at this point von Neumann seems to be envisaging a “memory organ” based on the structure of the vertebrate eye.
- 10.
See Haigh et al. (2014). We have subsequently discovered the following occurrence of “stored program ” in a 1946 draft of Goldstine and von Neumann’s Planning and Coding reports : “acoustic or electrostatic storage devices will […] provide […] the possibility to modify (erase and rewrite) stored program information under the machine’s own control.” This usage is adjectival rather than substantive, however, and does not appear in the published reports. It is therefore unlikely to have inspired the use of the phrase within IBM in 1949, and we do not believe that this materially affects our earlier discussion of the topic.
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Priestley, M., Haigh, T. (2019). The Media of Programming. In: Haigh, T. (eds) Exploring the Early Digital. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02152-8_8
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