🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jun.30.04.56.23.1988.24272@aramis.rutgers.edu>, webber@aramis.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes:
> 
> Hmmm.  I am not sure quite what you mean to be implying there.  The
> modifications were quite ``real.''  For example, there was a report
> authored by ``Anonymous'' entitled ``Description and Use of the ENIAC
> Converter Code'' reviewed in 1950 (vol 4, pp. 150-151 of Mathematical
> Tables and Aids to Computation) -- the report itself, consisting of 23
> mimeographed pages, was dated Nov 1949 according to the review.  

Just out of curiosity, what precisely were these modifications?  The way 
ENIAC was programmed (setting thousands of switches by hand) makes it hard 
to imagine that it would have been easy to convert it to a real stored-program 
machine.

> 
> Also of interest was the second meeting of the ACM, which was held in
> Dec 11 & 12 of 1947.  At this meeting, two papers were presented
> whose titles suggest a relevance to this discussion (alas, I have not
> seen these papers anywhere): ``General Principles of Coding, with
> application to the ENIAC'' by J. von Neumann and ``Adaptation of the
> ENIAC to von Neumann's coding technique'' by R. F. Clippinger.  The

I don't necessarily see the relevance.  I tend to think of "coding" as 
"hacking" and all i can learn from the titles is that von Neumann had 
a clever hack for something ... Since Eckert and Mauchly had the stored-
program idea before von Neumann came aboard, and i would assume that 
RFC was sufficiently closely involved to have known that, the titles would 
say even less about the "modifications" ... 

> < How is it that neither Burks, Eckert, nor Mauchly, who surely ought to 
> < know a thing or two about the ENIAC do not appear to have said anything 
> < about these modifications or this 1948 date ?  
> 
> Well, for one thing, they seem to not have been directly involved in
> the modification which was made after the ENIAC had moved to BRL.

Somehow i find it hard to believe that Eckert and Mauchly lost all interest 
in ENIAC, notwithstanding the move to BRL and work on the EDVAC.  If the 
big thing about the EDVAC was the stored-program idea (and given that 
BRL was presumably footing most of the bill for the two machines) then 
it is unlikely that the change would have gone unnoticed; recall that there 
was someone (Goldstine) whose job was to act as liason between BRL and 
UPenn ... and Goldstine could hardly wait to let the world know what a 
great idea EDVAC and its stored programs was ( ... the business with 
the preliminary EDVAC report).