The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

offer to Presper Eckert, but bitterness over the stored-program patents was escalating so rapidly at that point that he soon withdrew it.) And by 1946, von Neumann, Goldstine, and Burks had laid out a more refined concept of machine architecture in "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," a report that would prove to be even more influential than "First Draft." Among many other things, the 1946 report pointed out how much more efficient a computer would be if it could get access to each memory address at "random"—that is, instantaneously, without having to wait until the correct address came around on a circulating tape or a mercury delay line. Naturally, such a storage scheme became known as Random-Access Memory, or RAM. (Of course, the report also concluded that the memory unit should store the data as charged spots on the face of a cathode-ray tube—a cutting-edge technology in 1946, but now so thoroughly obsolete that almost no one remembers