Here are my notes from George Dyson's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, called "Von Neumann's Universe." Dyson's father, Freeman Dyson, was a contemporary of Einstein, Godel, Von Neumman and all, and raised George in their company and still tells him stories about those days. George Dyson has been collecting historical notes and recollections of the early days of the computer (and the bomb). His presentation, which draws on personal reminiscences, was funny, bawdy and fascinating
Von Neumann's reports were all public and non-proprietary — they were freely shared with NCR, IBM, RCA, etc.
The memory was really unreliable and sloppy — the difference between a 1 and a 0 was very subtle. Getting all this stuff to work was akin to getting today's unreliable Internet services to work.
The hackers' notebooks are full of bile: YAWN, CLOSING DOWN IN DISGUST, MANIAC LOST ITS MEMORY REGAINED ITS MEMORY, GARBAGE, CODE ERROR MACHINE NOT GUILTY, DAMN IT I CAN BE AS STUBBORN AS THIS THING, IBM IS PUTTING A TAR-LIKE SUBSTANCE ONT HE CARDS, MOUSE CRAWLED INTO BELT: RESULT NO MORE MOUSE. I HAVE NOW DUPLICATED BOTH RESULTS HOW WILL I KNOW WHICH IS RIGHT?
Update: Carrott reminds us that George Dyson gave a similar talk at the Long Now Foundation in Jan 2004 — you can download the audio from their lecture series page.
