USA. HOWARD H. AIKEN AND THE COMPUTER

Howard Aiken's contributions to the development of the computer-notably the Harvard MarkI (IBM ASSC) machine, and its successor the MarkII - are often excluded from the mainstream history of computers on two technicalities. The first is that MarkI and MarkII 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 HHAiken 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