Tom, I can't help with the actual phrase but I did track down an early example of the narrative of the Draft Report as disseminator of the particular features entailed by the phrase (I hope this is of interest)... Reading your e-mail, I played a hunch and took out my copy of Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill's _Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer_ (1951), I did not find a use of the term "stored program" (have not read the whole book but it is NOT in the index) but I did find a fairly standard ennunciation of the concept, an emphasis on it as key to the EDSAC design and an attribution back to the Draft Report as the source. "A store or memory is needed in automatic computing machines for the purpose of holding numbers, and in the EDSAC the same store is used to hold the orders; this is made possible by the device of expressing the orders in a numerical code. Several machines working on the same principles as the EDSAC are now in operationin the United States and in England. These principles derive from a report drafted by J. von Neumann in 1946 in connection with a new machine (the EDVAC) then projected by the Moore School of Electrical Engineering (University of Pennsylvania) where the ENIAC had been built." p. 3 Note the machines being contrasted against the EDSAC type are the original wire programming of the ENIAC and the tape controlled machines such as Aiken's Mark I/IBM ASCC, Bell relay and the IBM SSEC (their categorization of the various machines not mine). Later the book discusses modification of code "The facility of being able to modify the orders in the program by performing arithmetical operations on the numbers representing them is of great importance, and it is perhaps the feature most characteristic of program design for machines like the EDSAC." p. 9. Now this does not explicitly refer back to the discussion of page 3 but I'm not sure what "machines like the EDSAC" could mean other than other machines that were in Wilkes et al. understanding derived from the Draft Report. So the story that the Draft Report disseminated design of storing numbers and instructions in the same storage while taking advantage of self-modification, and the idea that this was its key contribution goes back at least to this 1951 book. Actually farther back then I would have guessed (I was not clear that these elements of the Draft Report had been singled out so early as the key novelty). So, if the phrase stored program with the modern meaning had been known to Wilkes et al. at the time of writing they would presumably have used it. An interesting contrast is the 1948 papers A Discussion on Computing Machines D. R. Hartree, M. H. A. Newman, M. V. Wilkes, F. C. Williams, J. H. Wilkinson and A. D. Booth, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Vol. 195, No. 1042 (Dec. 22, 1948), pp. 265-287. JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/98328 This is a series of short articles (proceedings of a workshop) where the authors explain their machines (in case of Williams he just describes his eponymous tube and not a fully machine) or more general aspects of electronic computing. Here in his 1948 description of the EDSAC, Wilkes does explain that the EDSAC will store orders and numbers in the same store, he does not note that this as special in any way (to be fair the article is short and he has to outline the whole machine). Similarly Wilkson describing the ACE decides to emphasize ways of optimizing the speed of delay lines by spacing instructions through the system (clear but implicit that instructions will be in the same store) and use of short tanks (delay lines that only store a single number for quick retrevial). Hartree and Newman discuss the general principles of the new machines and both emphasize the importance of "judgement" (Hartree after Babbage) or "conditional change of control" (Newman), what would now be called conditional branching, as a key control concept. They do not as far as I can tell mention storing instructions in the same device as data or self-modification of instructions. I mention all this because to me an interesting aspect of the story you are investigating is what various people have taken the key feature (essence?) of the computer to be (but you already knew that from reading my paper). -- Yours Truly, Allan Olley, PhD http://individual.utoronto.ca/fofound/ On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, 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

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members