Talk:First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC

Mistakes
There are a number of mistakes in this page:

1) Goldstine's job was NOT the secuity officer of the ENIAC project. He was a US Army Captain who oversaw the construction contract. He was also instrumental in getting the project funded.  There are many amusing stories about it.

2) I doubt anyone knows whether von Neumann wrote the report on the train or after he got to Los Alamos. Trains were not slow, and the report is a pretty long, so my guessis that most of it was written at Los Alamos.  There are specific oral histories that contain Goldstine's own recollections about the events.  They conatin more information than the book cited here.  See

Bergin, T. J., ed., Fifty Years of Army Computing: From ENIAC to MSRC, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Technical Report AR-SL-93, Aberdeen, 2000. Retrievable from the World Wide Web: http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS58495.

3) A lot more is known about how Wilkes came to be involved in computers. What is in the story is correct so far as it goes, but it could go a lot farther.

4) The mention of "acrimony" on the ENIAC project has some of the events out of order and does not mention what really caused the unhappiness. Much of that is described in the book by McCartney.

McCartney, S., ENIAC, Walker and Company, New York, 1999.

Briefly, the university treated Mauchly and Eckert very badly. Eckert had a masters degree from Penn which in those days was enough to get on the engineering faculty. Although he was very smart and ran a poject that supported easily a dozen people, he was never given a faculty position while some of his classmates were hired. Mauchly was faculty but not tenure track. When the ENIAC project started he had to quit teaching and take a cut in pay to work as a technician on his own invention! There are many more examples. Compared to all their other troubles, my guess would be that von Neumann was the least of their concerns. He only showed up to talk about cybernetics every couple of weeks. And anyway, Mauchly and Eckert thought the First Draft Report was useless.

5) The suggesting that not being able to patent EDVAC caused unhappiness on the ENIAC project is wrong because the EDVAC patent matter was not discussed until a year after everyone had left Penn.

Mauchly and Eckert had asked for and gotten the rights to ENIAC from the university. (I have never seen much discussion of property rights for the other people working on the project.) Some university faculty were unhappy about this, and demanded that Mauchly and Eckert sign over their rights to EDVAC, which was in principle being planned as ENIAC was being built. (I have never seen any design documents for EDVAC except the First Draft Report so I do not what if anything Mauchly and Eckert did. They appear to have been preocuppied with mercury delay line memories rather than computer architecture.)

Mauchly and Eckert refused to give up their rights and were fired. At this point von Neumann and Goldstine realized that the univeristy had no plan for intellectual property. Von Neumann went to the goverment lawyers in the Pentagon and told them that he may have some rights to EDVAC; he gave them a copy of his report as evidence. Meanwhile Mauchly and Eckert started their company and began writing their patent applications. Von Neumann did nothing. A year later the lawyers called a meeting and told everyone they thought the First Draft Report was a public announcement, so the time to file patents on it had lapsed. The ENIAC rights were safe because the lawyers had made sure that Mauchly and Eckert had filed the proper patent disclosures. The only person who got screwed was von Neumann. The minutes of the infamous meeting are actually available:

Stern, N., "Minutes of 1947 Patent Conference, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania," Annals of the History of Computing, 1985, 7(2):100--116.

Joseph Grcar 04:57, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Redirect
I notice that First Draft redirects here. Surely that name would be put to better use redirecting to a page about First Drafts in general, or about First Draft Theatre Company? --TimothyJacobson (talk) 18:45, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

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