Controversy
The treatment of the preliminary report as a publication (in the legal sense) was the source of bitter acrimony between factions of the EDVAC design team for two reasons. First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented; second, some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent, hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the First Draft led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone. (See Matthew effect.)
Read more about this topic: First Draft Of A Report On The EDVAC
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