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

[David Alan Grier]

Tom
	Two bounds for your search.  "Stored Program" is not in the 1950 IRE Standard on Computer Terms:


Standards on Electronic Computers: Definitions ofTerms, 1950
Proceedings of the IRE 
Volume:	39	 , Issue: 3	
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JRPROC.1951.231840 
Publication Year: 1951 , Page(s): 271 - 277


BUT IT IS USED IN THE 1953 IRE ARTICLE ON PROGRAMMING.  

Fundamentals of Digital Computer Programming
Thomas, W.H.
Proceedings of the IRE 
Volume:	41	 , Issue: 10	
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JRPROC.1953.274275 
Publication Year: 1953 , Page(s): 1245 - 1249

 I SHOULD NOTE THAT IT IS NOT USED IN THE COMPANION 1953 ARTICLE ON THE IBM 701.

DAVID


--------------------------------
David Alan Grier
Fellow, IEEE
President Elect, IEEE Computer Society 
Assoc. Prof., International Science & Technology Policy
Center for International Science and Technology Policy 
grier at gwu.edu




On Apr 2, 2012, at 4:34 PM, 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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