Technology History | Fuld Hall, Princeton — The Design Was Given Away and the Copies Ran First

The Electronic Computer Project began in the basement of this building, at an institute that had deliberately built itself no laboratories, over the objections of part of its own faculty. John von Neumann won that argument. The room he won is now a day nursery. The architecture that carries his name comes from a document rather than from a machine. The First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC ran to 101 pages, was written by hand on the train to Los Alamos, was typed up by Herman Goldstine, and went out to two dozen readers in late June 1945 with a single author's name on it. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who had built ENIAC and argued the design through with him, were not named. The project here then turned that omission into a policy, and a better one than the omission deserved. Its reports were published as the work went along and the ideas were placed in the public domain instead of being patented. Machines were built from those reports in the United States, in Australia and in Israel: ORDVAC and ILLIAC, JOHNNIAC, MANIAC, AVIDAC, SILLIAC, WEIZAC. Engineering ran late in Princeton, and at least one of those copies was working before the original was finished. The machine that gave the design its name was late to its own idea. It held 1,024 words in Williams tubes, it ran calculations from the summer of 1951, and the Institute dedicated it publicly on 10 June 1952. Its time went to the people who had paid for it and to those who could use it: nuclear physicists, meteorologists, fluid dynamicists. The Institute decided in 1956 to build no further machines and most of the engineers left. Von Neumann died the following year, the computer ran until 1960, and it now belongs to the Smithsonian, which holds it without displaying it. What stands here is the hall in the photograph, brick and cupola and clock, with a lawn in front of it and a stair inside going down to where the project started. The machine itself was built out on the grounds, in a laboratory the Institute put up for it. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons