john from FOLDOC

A mainframe computer based on a design by John von Neuman built at the Institute for Advanced Study, USA. The Johnniac went live in 1953 and was decommissioned in 1966. Its memory consisted of 80 special "Selectron" vacuum tubes, each of which held 256 bits of data.

Last updated: 2003-06-07

JOHNNIAC Open Shop System

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(JOSS) An early, simple, interactive calculator language developed by Charles L. Baker at Rand in 1964. There were two versions: JOSS I and JOSS II.

[Connection with Johnniac?]

["JOSS Users' Reference Manual", R.L. Clark, Report F-1535/9, RAND Corp (Jan 1975)].

[Sammet 1969, pp. 217-226].

Last updated: 2004-07-11

John Ousterhout

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/oh'st*r-howt/ John K. Ousterhout, the designer of Tcl and Tk, and founder of Scriptics.

John Tukey

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The eminent statistician credited with coining the term "bit" in 1949.

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Tukey.html.

Last updated: 2003-02-28

John Vincent Atanasoff

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John Vincent Atanasoff, 1903-10-04 - 1995-06-15. An American mathemetical physicist, and the inventor of the electronic digital computer. Between 1937 and 1942 he built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer with Clifford Berry, at the Iowa State University.

Atanasoff was born on 1903-10-04 in Hamilton, New York. In 1925, he got a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida. In 1926 he received a Master's degree in Maths from Iowa State University. He received a PhD as a theoretical physicist from the University of Wisconsin in 1930.

While an associate professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State University, Atanasoff began to envision a digital computational device, believing analogue devices to be too restrictive. Whilst working on his electronic digital computer, Atanasoff was introduced to a graduate student named Clifford Berry, who helped him build the computer.

The first prototype of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was demonstrated in December 1939. Although no patent was awarded for the new computer, in 1973 US District Judge Earl R. Larson declared Atanasoff the inventor of the digital computer (declaring the ENIAC patent invalid).

Atanasoff was awarded the National Medal of Technology by US President Bush on 1990-11-13. He died following a stroke on 1995-06-15.

John Vincent Atanasoff and the Birth of the Digital Computer.

["Atanasoff Forgotten Father of the Computer", C. R. Mollenhoff, Iowa State University Press 1988].

Last updated: 2001-10-03

John von Neumann

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/jon von noy'mahn/ Born 1903-12-28, died 1957-02-08.

A Hungarian-born mathematician who did pioneering work in quantum physics, game theory, and computer science. He contributed to the USA's Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bomb.

von Neumann was invited to Princeton University in 1930, and was a mathematics professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies from its formation in 1933 until his death.

From 1936 to 1938 Alan Turing was a visitor at the Institute and completed a Ph.D. dissertation under von Neumann's supervision. This visit occurred shortly after Turing's publication of his 1934 paper "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" which involved the concepts of logical design and the universal machine. von Neumann must have known of Turing's ideas but it is not clear whether he applied them to the design of the IAS Machine ten years later.

While serving on the BRL Scientific Advisory Committee, von Neumann joined the developers of ENIAC and made some critical contributions. In 1947, while working on the design for the successor machine, EDVAC, von Neumann realized that ENIAC's lack of a centralized control unit could be overcome to obtain a rudimentary stored program computer. He also proposed the fetch-execute cycle. His ideas led to what is now often called the von Neumann architecture.

http://sis.pitt.edu/~mbsclass/is2000/hall_of_fame/vonneuma.htm.

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html.

http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/54nord/.

Last updated: 2004-01-14

Nearby terms:

joe ♦ joe code ♦ John Atanasoff ♦ John Gilmore ♦ John Mauchly ♦ John McCarthy

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