Greed always rears its ugly head...."Dyson, however, does not catalog the excluded inventions listed in the contract. With the wording of his next sentence in the book, “As Eckert later complained, ‘he [von Neumann] sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM,”’ Dyson seems to acquiesce to the claims of the ENIAC group."
Wow..."In 1954, a group of scientists ran millions of simulated hands of blackjack on an IBM 701 looking to determine the best playing decision for every combination of cards. The result of the study was the set of correct rules for hitting, standing, doubling or splitting in a blackjack game which are still the same today."
SkyNet, LOL..."The IBM 701 has a claim to be the first computer displaying the potential of artificial intelligence in Arthur Samuel's checkers-playing program on February 24, 1956. The program, which was developed for play on the IBM 701, was demonstrated to the public on television. Self-proclaimed checkers master Robert Nealey played the game on an IBM 7094 computer in 1962 and the computer won. It is still considered a milestone for artificial intelligence and it offered the public during the early 1960s an example of the capabilities of an electronic computer."
Interesting...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
versus
"There are rather too many errors for comfort in Turing’s Cathedral, but they tend to be inconsequential. Willis Ware is said to have joined RAND, “where the JOHNNIAC had just been built.” Actually, Ware was hired by RAND in May 1952 to help build the JOHNNIAC. Although different RAND engineers state different dates for when the JOHNNIAC “went on the air,” an idiom that originated in an era when computers relied on radio tubes, the earliest date given is the first half of 1953."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
versus
"There are rather too many errors for comfort in Turing’s Cathedral, but they tend to be inconsequential. Willis Ware is said to have joined RAND, “where the JOHNNIAC had just been built.” Actually, Ware was hired by RAND in May 1952 to help build the JOHNNIAC. Although different RAND engineers state different dates for when the JOHNNIAC “went on the air,” an idiom that originated in an era when computers relied on radio tubes, the earliest date given is the first half of 1953."
When I first joined DEC, they had a computer museum right in the same building where I worked. Various memory solutions were pretty interesting - large rotating drums coated with iron oxide. The core memory in the HP "desktop" calculator was said to survive a full AC power loss - the computer would simply start back up working again, at wherever it left off, when plugged back in. Try that with your Windoze machine...
I have seen the first and for a long time had a circuit board with the second. An interesting weaving of wires thru a “magnetic” ring.
dave