“In all the years after the war, whenever you visited one of the installations with a modern mainframe computer, you would always find somebody doing a shock wave problem,” remembers German American astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild, who, still an enemy alien, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the outbreak of World War II. “If you asked them how they came to be working on that, it was always von Neumann who put them onto it. So they became the footprint of von Neumann, walking across the scene of modern computers.”
