[Looks like the list is having a bad week - there's some kind of issue with our Go Daddy domain registration that sometimes interacts with certain ISPs to bounce mail with a message from "mailstore1.secureserver.net" that the address is rejected. If anyone has expertise in this area and can help us solve the problem that would be appreciated. In that case the messages never make it to our listserv manager. Anyway, Atsushi asked me to forward this - see below for my reply]. From: Atsushi Akera [mailto:akeraa@rpi.edu] Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 5:47 AM To: 'David Alan Grier'; 'Thomas Haigh' Cc: members@sigcis.org Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Hi David, Hi Tom, Just in this context, the term "program" is used extensively in the context of ENIAC. It's been a while since I've gone through the records, and I didn't go back to check it. But as I recall, Mauchly was among those who brought the terminology of 'program' based on his amateur radio experience. I assume this was referring in general terms to a sequence of activities, similar to a conference program or a program for an organized luncheon. You would know this part better, but I think the other conventional term from the period would have been "plan of calculation," based on the work of human computers. The reference to "instruction tables" (in considering Paul's post) strikes me as something that could come out of the fact that there was contemplation of using the ENIAC function tables to store instructions. (This would require tracking the dates & influence, however. It's just a guess for now) Meanwhile the term "storage" would have of course gone back to Babbage (mill and store), but gained significant currency once everyone developed an interest in mercury delay lines as a possible storage device. What's perhaps interesting in all this is that technological and material artifacts, as manifestations of both human and machine computation practices, were heavily influencing the terminology people used to understand the early process of computation. New language of course has to be assembled in order to sort through and understand new technological phenomena (electronic computing), and we see during this period various efforts to combine past terminology into a workable description of the new technology-followed by some process whereby consensus emerges around those terms. I think it's useful to think of "stored program" in that context-and when that particular articulation became important for the practitioners. As I recall, stored programs weren't all that important in the early years. Von Neumann's single bit used to designate instruction from data was more from the point of view of efficient storage of the two types of information, not from any notions about stored programs related to computabilitiy. Even when the term came into existence, it may not have had this kind of reference either. perhaps worth keeping in mind. Best wishes! - Atsushi From: Thomas Haigh [mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Thomas Haigh Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 6:39 PM To: 'Atsushi Akera' Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Thanks Atsushi, I think von Neumann might have felt the need to flag data vs. code as he planned delay line storage at this point and was concerned with interleaving them for efficient access. Possibly he recognized the danger of accidentally overwriting code, and saw this as a kind of memory protection feature as later implemented on multitasking systems to protect programs from each other. Although the general organization of the 1945 EDVAC instruction set does not betray a concern with the convenience of programming. The point about Babbage and the "store" is something I'd been wondering about myself, and it's interesting to see that you have the same idea. As I look more at the 1945-48 documents, it does seem that the idea of storing programs and data in the same memory was quickly recognized as one of the key advantages of EDVAC-type machines but mostly on the grounds of efficiency, simplicity and flexibility rather than the potential for self modification. E.g. Eckert in the Moore School lectures volume says the big advantage is that storage can be allocated as needed for a particular application. After all, ENIAC has already shown that you could do things like conditional branching and indexing through an array without needing to modify stored program code. I agree with the bigger point about the importance of categories and terminology. It's interesting that with all the endless discussion of "stored program" nobody ever seems to have tried to find out where the term comes from. Tom From: Atsushi Akera [mailto:akeraa@rpi.edu] Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:35 PM To: 'Thomas Haigh' Subject: RE: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the PHRASE Agreed. By the way, I tried to send the message to the group, but it bounced. Not sure why. Please feel free to forward if you can. Also keep in mind that with circulating storage, there's no way to slow down what's coming out of the memory. So the instruction/data bit can be used as an efficient way to implement (in engineering) where information goes in a machine. - Atsushi (p.s. if you encounter problems with RPI's spam filter, please send the message to my alternate email account: <mailto:atsushi_akera@hotmail.com> atsushi_akera@hotmail.com, preferably with a quick note to this account indicating that you sent a message there since otherwise I don't check that account regularly. - Thanks!) _________________________________________________________ Atsushi Akera Associate Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies Director, First Year Studies Program--Sage 5206 Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 8th Street Troy, NY 12180 USA ph: 518.279.9708/fx:518.276-2659/e:akeraa@rpi.edu /w: http://www.rpi.edu/~akeraa