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Happy Birthday, Von Neumann (And Linus!)
noims writes "Sunday is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modern Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd." Update: 12/28 01:07 GMT by T : deja206 writes "Today (December 28, CET) also is Linus Torvalds' 34th birthday. Now we probably wouldn't be here talking about all this stuff if it weren't for him. Thank you for Linux, happy birthday!"
He is
the modren
man
(secret secret, he's got a secret)
Thank you for Linux, happy birthday!"
Shouldn't that be " Thank you Linus, happy birthday! " ??
Not trying to start something here, but..
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"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
Er, yes, but remember that they (like Tommy Flowers and Charles Babbage) aren't Americans and so, for most of your readership, don't exist...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
It appears you overlooked the modern modifier. While Pascal, Babbage, Lovelace, Atanasoff, Turing, Aiken, Eckert, and Mauchley (to drop just a few names) were all pioneers in their own right, their programs were strictly hardware-implemented. To alter the program sequence, the machine had to be modified. The von Neumann machine was the first stored-program computer to use the memory-control unit-ALU with accumulator design still used today (Wilkes created the first stored-program computer with the EDSAC three years earlier), and thus revolutionized computing, turning it into what it is today, hence father of modern computing.
Zuse's work was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin conducted by the Allies in 1944, so while certainly a pioneer, he cannot, unfortunately, be regarded in any way the father of computing as we know it today.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
Hungarians use the German pronunciation of this name. My wife's grandmother's maiden name was Neumann (no relation), and in modern Hungary (and certainly at the time) it is given the German pronunciation.
There was an apocryphal story going around Budapest about how Janos' father acquired the title. He (Janos' father) had done some substantial service for the Emporer, and was asked what he wanted, he (Janos' father) said that there was nothing the Emporer could do for him, but his father (Janos' grandfather) always wanted a title. By such means, as the story goes, Janos' father inherited a title instead of buying one. Again, this story is almost certainly apocryphal. Purchasing of minor titles was a standard practice in those days. In the US he was called "Jonny" by his friends. Whether he went by "Janos" or something like "Jancsi" in Hungarian is not something that I have any stories about, apocryphal or otherwise.One great mark of Neumann was what it really means to be multidisplinary. Often when you have, say, a computational linguist, the linguists will say, "well, he doesn't really understand linguistics deeply, but I guess his good in CS" and the CS people will say, "Well, he doesn't really understand CS deeply, but I guess he knows a lot about linguistics." With Neumann, the situation is the opposite. CS claims him as one of their own, mathematics claims him as one of their own, physics claims him as one of their own, and while nobody claims him as an economist, his work a foundation of an important subdiscipline of economics.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
By the way, I've never heard of Turing actually implementing his machine in hardware. It was a hardware design, implementable with pen and paper, but I don't think he actually went to the trouble of creating the machine. Got any refs for that?