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 Alan Grier

Fellow, IEEE

President Elect, IEEE Computer Society

Assoc. Prof., International Science & Technology Policy

Center for International Science and Technology Policy

grier@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@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On
Behalf Of Evan Koblentz
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 12:08 AM
To: members@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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