JOHN VON NEUMANN: a Calculating Man
A great mind teaches an electronic brain how to remember
With the acceleration of the cold war in the early 1950s, von Neumann was pressed into service as a military strategist. He applied game theory to the nuclear arms race, chaired a panel charged with unsnarling efforts to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles, and took a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission. In the summer of 1955, he felt a pain in his shoulder; the diagnosis was cancer. He died in 1957 at age 53. Born a Jew, von Neumann had converted to Catholicism in 1930 when he wed his first wife, a Catholic, but he had fallen away from the church seven years later. Just before his death, he went back to religious practice. Was the decision a leap of faith by a lifelong logician? "There probably is a God," he had said to his dying mother. "Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't." Or was it a calculating man's swiftest calculation yet? To at least one visitor to his hospital room, von Neumann jauntily paraphrased Pascal: So long as there is any chance nonbelievers will be damned, logic dictates that you hedge your bets just before you give up the ghost.
Milestones
1951 UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer in the United States, is built for the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
1958 The North American air-defense system called SAGE introduces interactive computing, with punch cards giving way to continuous calculating. This leads to networked computers accessible by remote terminals.
1958 Integrated circuit are developed. Silicon chips take the place of many individual transistors wired together, dramatically reducing costs and increasing computer power.
1964 IBM System/360 is the first family of computers built around a common structure. The software industry is born when IBM is forced to let others write programs for the 360.
1975 MITS Altair, the first personal computer, is announced on the cover of Popular Electronics as a kit for hobbyists. 1991 The World Wide Web is developed by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) so physicists can swap data on the Internet. With Berners-Lee's standards for addresses and data exchange, the Internet grows from a researchers' tool into a powerful new public medium.
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