Talk:First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

Mistakes

There are a number of mistakes in this page:

1) Goldstine's job was NOT the secuity officer of the ENIAC project. He was a US Army Captain who oversaw the construction contract. He was also instrumental in getting the project funded. There are many amusing stories about it.

2) I doubt anyone knows whether von Neumann wrote the report on the train or after he got to Los Alamos. Trains were not slow, and the report is a pretty long, so my guessis that most of it was written at Los Alamos. There are specific oral histories that contain Goldstine's own recollections about the events. They conatin more information than the book cited here. See

Bergin, T. J., ed., Fifty Years of Army Computing: From ENIAC to MSRC, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Technical Report AR-SL-93, Aberdeen, 2000. Retrievable from the World Wide Web: http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS58495.

3) A lot more is known about how Wilkes came to be involved in computers. What is in the story is correct so far as it goes, but it could go a lot farther.

4) The mention of "acrimony" on the ENIAC project has some of the events out of order and does not mention what really caused the unhappiness. Much of that is described in the book by McCartney.

McCartney, S., ENIAC, Walker and Company, New York, 1999.

Briefly, the university treated Mauchly and Eckert very badly. Eckert had a masters degree from Penn which in those days was enough to get on the engineering faculty. Although he was very smart and ran a poject that supported easily a dozen people, he was never given a faculty position while some of his classmates were hired. Mauchly was faculty but not tenure track. When the ENIAC project started he had to quit teaching and take a cut in pay to work as a technician on his own invention! There are many more examples. Compared to all their other troubles, my guess would be that von Neumann was the least of their concerns. He only showed up to talk about cybernetics every couple of weeks. And anyway, Mauchly and Eckert thought the First Draft Report was useless.

5) The suggesting that not being able to patent EDVAC caused unhappiness on the ENIAC project is wrong because the EDVAC patent matter was not discussed until a year after everyone had left Penn.

Mauchly and Eckert had asked for and gotten the rights to ENIAC from the university. (I have never seen much discussion of property rights for the other people working on the project.) Some university faculty were unhappy about this, and demanded that Mauchly and Eckert sign over their rights to EDVAC, which was in principle being planned as ENIAC was being built. (I have never seen any design documents for EDVAC except the First Draft Report so I do not what if anything Mauchly and Eckert did. They appear to have been preocuppied with mercury delay line memories rather than computer architecture.)

Mauchly and Eckert refused to give up their rights and were fired. At this point von Neumann and Goldstine realized that the univeristy had no plan for intellectual property. Von Neumann went to the goverment lawyers in the Pentagon and told them that he may have some rights to EDVAC; he gave them a copy of his report as evidence. Meanwhile Mauchly and Eckert started their company and began writing their patent applications. Von Neumann did nothing. A year later the lawyers called a meeting and told everyone they thought the First Draft Report was a public announcement, so the time to file patents on it had lapsed. The ENIAC rights were safe because the lawyers had made sure that Mauchly and Eckert had filed the proper patent disclosures. The only person who got screwed was von Neumann. The minutes of the infamous meeting are actually available:

Stern, N., "Minutes of 1947 Patent Conference, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania," Annals of the History of Computing, 1985, 7(2):100--116.

Joseph Grcar 04:57, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Redirect

I notice that First Draft redirects here. Surely that name would be put to better use redirecting to a page about First Drafts in general, or about First Draft Theatre Company? --TimothyJacobson (talk) 18:45, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130305070628/http://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/comphist/96summary/index.html to http://ftp.arl.army.mil/mike/comphist/96summary/index.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:39, 1 October 2017 (UTC)