[SIGCIS-Members] "In 1946, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first stored-program electronic computer."

[Thomas Haigh]

There is an interesting sentence in the publisher's blub for Bartik's book:
"In 1946, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first
stored-program electronic computer."

Nothing in any way controversial there...
[Pause]
.... except for

1) Post-conversion ENIAC did acquire the new control method introduced in
the 1945 "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." Having looked at this
conversion very closely, in association with my work on the topic with Mark
Priestley and Crispin Rope, I'm probably more sympathetic to the general
direction of the claim than most of you. However, that's also convinced me
that "stored program computer" has been given too many different implicit
definitions for that to be a prudent, or even meaningful, claim to make
without at least attaching some kind of adjective to modify "stored
program." (ENIAC essentially held instructions and data in an addressable
manually erasable ROM while storing variables in a separate set of
registers. It had other modern features including conditional branches and
used indirect addressing so that the address acted on by an instruction
could be modified at runtime).
2) The work took place in 1947 and 1948 rather than 1946.
3) Bartik played a role as a subcontractor but was not, by any stretch of
the imagination, leading the effort.

Those of you interested in learning more on this topic will enjoy our series
of three forthcoming articles in Annals and our book in progress "ENIAC in
Action: von Neumann, the Bomb, and the Programming Revolution."

Meanwhile, I am curious to see how well the book itself aligns with the mass
of archival sources on ENIAC. It will, in any event, provide some grist for
one of our book chapters, "Remembering ENIAC."

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 4:19 PM
To: sigcis
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Bartik autobiography available / Colossus name?

SIGCIS'ers,

Jean Bartik's autobiography is now available at
http://tsup.truman.edu/item.asp?itemid=480. There is also an e-book version
at Amazon. (I recently learned that Kindle books can be read through a
browser or through an iOS/Android app -- you don't need a Kindle device.)

Also: Does anyone know how the British Colossus computer got its name, other
than the general assumption "because it was big"...? I emailed TNMOC about
this. They wrote back and said they don't know and that nobody ever asked.
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