———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ed Lazowska <lazowska@cs.washington.edu>
Date: Sat, May 14, 2011 at 5:58 PM
Subject: [Cs-staff] UW CSE Colloquium by George Dyson, Tuesday the 17th, EE 105
To: Faculty <faculty@cs.washington.edu>, Cs-Grads <cs-grads@cs.washington.edu>, Cs-Ugrads <cs-ugrads@cs.washington.edu>, Staff <cs-staff@cs.washington.edu>, Charles Simonyi <charless@intentsoft.com>, Nathan Myhrvold <nathanm@intven.com>, chairs <chairs@engr.washington.edu>, Brian Bershad <bershad@google.com>, Peter Lee <petelee@microsoft.com>, Linda Stone <linda@lindastone.net>, Ana Mari Cauce <cauce@u.washington.edu>, Escience_bbl <Escience_bbl@u.washington.edu>, Cliff Mass <cliff@atmos.washington.edu>, Lyndsay Downs <lcd@lazowska.org>
the brother of Esther, and the son of Freeman.) Recently he spent
several years rummaging through the basements of the Institute for
Advanced Study –facilitated by Charles Simonyi, Nathan Myhrvold, and
others — examining the long-buried papers of von Neumann, Bigelow,
etc. to unearth the history of von Neumann’s IAS computer. The
resulting book, “Turing’s Cathedral,” will be published soon; I was
fortunate to read a pre-pub copy and it’s wonderful in every respect.
George will be speaking on this subject on Tuesday at 3:30 in EE 105.
I urge you to attend, and to spread the word. It’s important and
fascinating to know where all of the things we take for granted came
from.
https://www.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/mvis/mvis?ID=1040
George Dyson
The Physical Realization of an Electronic Computing Instrument 1945-1958
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
3:30pm, EEB-105
Abstract
Sixty years ago, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New
Jersey, a 32 x 32 x 40-bit matrix of 24-microsecond random access
memory was undergoing initial tests. John von Neumann (1903-1957)
succeeded in jump-starting the digital revolution by bringing
engineers into the den of the mathematicians, rather than by bringing
mathematicians into a den of engineers. This implementation of Alan
Turing’s Universal Machine broke the distinction between numbers that
mean things and numbers that do things, and the world would never be
the same. With 5 kilobytes of storage, von Neumann and colleagues
tackled previously intractable problems ranging from thermonuclear
explosions, stellar evolution, and long-range weather forecasting to
cellular automata, network optimization, and the origins of life.
Codes were small enough to be completely debugged, but hardware could
not be counted on to perform consistently from one kilocycle to the
next. This situation is now reversed.
Bio
George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests have
included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak
(Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and
telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), and the
exploration of space (Project Orion, 2002). Turing’s Cathedral, “a
creation myth for the digital universe,” will be published by Pantheon
(USA) and Penguin (UK) in January 2012.