Компьютерная техника. Еремина Н.В. - 36 стр.

7 UNIT VII

           The Comparative Analysis of the History of the Computer Science
                 and Computer Engineering in the USA and Russia

                                            USA
Howard H. Aiken And The Computer

            Howard Aiken's contributions to the development of the computer -
     notably the Harvard Mark I (IBM ASSC) machine, and its successor the
     Mark II - are often excluded from the mainstream history of computers on
     two technicalities. The first is that Mark I and Mark II were electro-
     mechanical rather than electronic; the second one is that Aiken was
     never convinced that computer programs should be treated as data in
     what has come to be known as the von Neumann concept, or the stored
     program.
       It is not proposed to discuss here the origins and significance of the stored
program. Nor I wish to deal with the related problem of whether the machines before
the stored program were or were not "computers". This subject is complicated by the
confusion in actual names given to machines. For example, the ENIAC, which did
not incorporate a stored program, was officially named a computer: Electronic
Numeral Integrator And Computer. But the first stored-program machine to be put
into regular operation was Maurice Wiles' EDSAC: Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator. It seems to be rather senseless to deny many truly significant
innovations (by H.Aiken and by Eckert and Mauchly), which played an important
role in the history of computers, on the arbitrary ground that they did not incorporate
the stored-program concept. Additionally, in the case of Aiken, it is significant that
there is a current computer technology that does not incorporate the stored programs
and that is designated as (at least by TEXAS INSTRUMENTS®) as "Harvard
architecture", though, it should more properly be called "Aiken architecture". In this
technology the program is fix and not subject to any alteration save by intent -as in
some computers used for telephone switching and in ROM.
       Aiken was a visionary, a man ahead of his times. Grace Hopper and others
remember his prediction in the late 1940s, even before the vacuum tube had been
wholly replaced by the transistor, that the time would come when a machine even
more powerful than the giant machines of those days could be fitted into a space as
small as a shoe box.
       Some weeks before his death Aiken had made another prediction. He pointed
out that hardware considerations alone did not give a true picture of computer costs.
As hardware has become cheaper, software has been apt to get more expensive. And
then he gave us his final prediction: "The time will come", he said, "when