[SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello Brian,

That is correct -- the original 1945 First Draft had a one bit flag on each
word specifying whether it held data or an instruction. For instruction
words only the address subfield could be modified. (None of the preceding
respects the report's original terminology).

So there is also an interesting story to be told regarding the origin and
evolution of the concept into its canonical form. This was recently given a
balanced and clear treatment by my collaborator Mark Priestley in Chapter 6
of his book "A Science of Operations."
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Operations-Invention-Programming-Computing/dp/
1848825544 (Ironically, I discovered the book when searching for new
literature on the history of operations research for a different project --
the title is its weakest point).

However, I don't recall anyone having paid attention to the term itself.

Tom


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Randell [mailto:Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk] 
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2012 3:44 PM
To: Thomas Haigh
Cc: Brian Randell; members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the
PHRASE

Hi Tom:

Not directly responding to your query, and commenting from memory, rather
than having rechecked my sources, my recollection is that the 1945 First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC did not allow operations on stored
instructions, but Turing's 1945 proposal for ACE did - to my mind a
necessary final step towards the generality that I associate with the stored
program computer concept.

Cheers

Brian


On 2 Apr 2012, at 21:34, Thomas Haigh wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> I have a query related to a project I am working on concerning the 
> conversion of ENIAC to stored program control in 1948, initially to 
> run the first computerized Monte Carlo calculations. All this took 
> place prior to the first operation of the Manchester Baby. That makes 
> the question of what one means by "stored program" a very interesting one.
> 
> This question was much discussed in the early days of the history of 
> computing (1970s, early 1980s). I am starting to dig back into primary 
> sources for early use of the phrases "stored program" and "stored 
> program concept" to get a better idea of how these terms were used in 
> the 1940s/early 1950s and what people thought they meant at the time.
> 
> To clarify, almost everyone who has written about this cites the 1945 
> "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" as the initial dissemination of 
> the stored program concept although there has been considerable debate 
> as to the source of the ideas contained therein. However that document 
> does not contain the phase "stored program." Or indeed use the word 
> "program" in the body of the text. Or, remarkably, "EDVAC." "Stored" 
> shows up a few times, though less frequently than "remembered." So, 
> ignoring for the moment the relationship of the report to later 
> definitions of the concept, we can agree that it was not the source of 
> the phrase. The most obvious summary of the idea using the report's 
> own terminology would be "remembered instruction device" rather than
"stored program computer."
> 
> I had thought about the 1946 Moore School lectures as a possible 
> vector for the phase "stored program" as well as the concept. The 
> phrase shows up many times in the Moore School lectures book but so 
> far I have spotted it only in the 1980s editorial material rather than in
the original lecture summaries.
> 
> By 1954 "stored program computer" is showing up without explanation or 
> citation required in the description of the IBM 650 published in the 
> inaugural issue of Journal of the ACM. It is not particularly common 
> in the ACM DL material for the rest of the decade ("automatic 
> computer" and "digital computer" are more prevalent) but continues to pop
up occasionally.
> The best the OED can do is 1957, which is even later.
> 
> So, any thoughts on who came up with this phrase and when? I'm 
> planning to dig deeper in search of early usage, for example into the 
> 1950 "High-Speed Computing Devices" ERA book and some of the other CBI 
> reprints from the 1940s, but it occurred to me that someone on the 
> list might already know the answer to the question.
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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