On von Neumann and computer architecture

From one of your friendly classmates...

Essentially the story is that the von Neumann architecture is based on a paper that von Neumann called "The first draft of the EDVAC". The paper was based on a proposal by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.

Now the army Lt. who released the paper to the public by the name of Lt Herman Goldstine removed all mention of the names Mauchly and Eckert from the paper. He then distributed the paper to a number of von Neumann's associates.

Now Mauchly and Eckert were under the official secrets acts. ENIAC was patented in 1964, which was filed in 1947. They lost out on revenue patent. The patent was revoked in 1973 because of the public disclosure of Mauchly and Eckert's names on the first draft.

So most recognised that Mauchly and Eckert were the inventors of the von Neumann model, not von Neumann himself.

Monash actually teach all this in FIT1001.

IEEE computer society http://www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/entrepreneuereckert quote "Some computer historians—and Eckert himself—believed that the widely-adopted term "von Neumann architecture" should properly be known as the "Eckert Architecture," since the stored-program concept central to the von Neumann architecture had already been developed at the Moore School by the time von Neumann arrived on the scene in 1944-1945."