Alan Turing : The Enigma the Centenary Edition by Hodges Andrew; Hofstadter Douglas (FRW)

Author:Hodges, Andrew; Hofstadter, Douglas (FRW) [Hodges, Andrew; Hofstadter, Douglas (FRW)]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Will write to Stibitz: my curiosity to learn more about the relay computation method, as well as my expectations concerning possibilities in this direction, are much aroused.

On 10 April he wrote again to say that Stibitz had shown him ‘the principle and working of his relay counting mechanisms’. On 14 April he wrote to R. Peierls at Los Alamos about the ‘shock decay problem’, saying that it could probably be mechanised, and adding that he was now also in touch with Aiken. In July 1944 there were negotiations to use the Harvard-IBM machine. But then everything changed. For the pressure of wartime demands had brought about the same technological revolution as had happened at Bletchley, and at exactly the same time. In quite another place, namely the engineering department of the University of Pennsylvania (the Moore School), work had begun on yet another large calculator in April 1943. This was the ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.

The new machine was designed by the electronic engineers J.P. Eckert and J. Mauchly, although von Neumann’s first knowledge of it, apparently something of an accident, came through talking on a railroad station with H.H. Goldstine, a mathematician associated with the project. Von Neumann seized upon the possibilities opened up by a machine that when built would perform arithmetical operations a thousand times faster than Aiken’s. From August 1944 he was regularly attending ENIAC team meetings, writing on 1 November 1944 to Weaver:

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