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

[David Alan Grier]

Tom,
	And yet another problem is that the community didn't start using "program" in its current sense much before 1950.  Though the ENIAC team used program, they used it to refer to the electrical control systems of the machines.  The four papers by Burk, Goldstine and von Neumann using the terms "code" and "coding".  At one point I checked all the conferences between 46 and 48 and found that the work program was uncommon and clearly used in the current sense.  I suspect that 1948 might be the lower bound for this search but I have no evidence that pushes it that far.  

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 3, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Thomas Haigh wrote:

> Hmm. Google suggests that this speech was given in 1991, by which point
> there is no shortage of sources saying that the "stored program concept" was
> created in the 1940s. What I'm looking for is evidence that someone actually
> called it that prior to 1953, which is the usage found by David Alan Grier
> yesterday and the current record holder.
> 
> Tom 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
> Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
> Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 12:08 AM
> To: members at sigcis.org
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the
> PHRASE
> 
> From Pres Eckert's Tokyo speech (thanks to Thomas Miller for observing
> this):
> 
> "My big idea was the idea of the stored instruction sequence or program,
> using a single fast memory for both data and instruction, with no
> distinction between registers used for many purposes. At the time I first
> though of this idea, (in January 1944)..."
> 
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