| First Draft Of A Report On The Edvac |
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The title page of the report reads:
Von Neumann wrote the report by hand while commuting by train to Los Alamos, New Mexico and mailed the handwritten notes back to Philadelphia . Goldstine had the report typed and duplicated. While the date on the typed report is June 30, 24 copies of the ''First Draft'' were distributed to persons closely connected with the EDVAC project five days earlier on June 25 . Interest in the report caused it to be sent all over the world; Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University cited his excitement over the report's content as the impetus for his decision to travel to the United States for the Moore School Lectures in Summer 1946. The treatment of the preliminary report as a publication (in the legal sense) was the source of bitter acrimony between factions of the EDVAC design team for two reasons. First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented; second, some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University Of Pennsylvania 's Moore School Of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the ''First Draft'' was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal Logic in which von Neumann was fluent, hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the ''First Draft'' led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone. (See Matthew Effect .) EXTERNAL LINK REFERENCES |
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