The MANIAC Computer, Turing, and von Neumann: A Historical Overview

五、MANIAC

During the immense pressure of World War II, the United Kingdom and the United States independently built the earliest computers, Colossus and ENIAC, which shared many similarities: punched‑card input, vacuum‑tube computation, massive size, and decisive contributions to the war effort. Historians credit Bletchley Park with shortening the European campaign by one to two years and the Manhattan Project with ending the Pacific war. Core figures Turing and von Neumann sought to overcome the machines’ limitation of being designed for single purposes and lacking program storage, aiming to build a universal Turing‑complete machine as predicted in Turing’s 1936 paper.

After WWII, the looming Cold War intensified the need for greater computing power to support nuclear weapons development, prompting von Neumann to advocate for a new machine at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study despite institutional resistance and funding constraints.

Von Neumann’s persuasive lobbying eventually secured support from Harvard, Chicago, and IBM, leading Princeton to agree to build the MANIAC computer.

Completed in 1947, MANIAC surpassed ENIAC: it used only 2,000 vacuum tubes versus ENIAC’s 20,000, weighed one ton instead of thirty, and, crucially, could store programs read from punched cards in memory. It became the world’s first truly general‑purpose electronic computer, performing notable tasks such as a 60‑day calculation that validated the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

Alumni Joshua Dranoff (later a Northwestern chemistry professor) used MANIAC for his doctoral research in the 1950s, while Jerry Porter (later a Penn mathematics professor) was the first undergraduate to complete a thesis on the machine, both describing the arduous maintenance and the excitement of accessing a cutting‑edge computer.

By 1960, when MANIAC was retired to the Smithsonian, the United States already possessed about 6,000 computers.

In contrast, post‑war Britain saw Turing’s work at Bletchley Park largely erased, and his attempts to secure funding for a stored‑program computer were rebuffed, leading him to Manchester where he contributed to the Manchester Mark I.

Turing later proposed the famous Turing Test in 1950, faced persecution for his homosexuality, and ultimately died by cyanide poisoning in 1954.

Von Neumann died in 1957 of bone cancer, likely linked to radiation exposure from the Manhattan Project; his death marked the end of an era, after which IBM and MIT dominated computer development.

六、咬了一口的苹果

In 1950, Turing introduced the Turing Test, using a metaphor of indistinguishable responses between a man and a woman to illustrate machine intelligence; his personal life later led to legal persecution and a tragic suicide.

七、“告诉他们，我度过了极好的一生。”

The narrative returns to 1939, describing a fictional encounter between Wittgenstein and Turing, and later the daily lives of von Neumann and Turing at Princeton, highlighting their relentless pursuit of mathematics and computing despite societal prejudice.

Ultimately, the article reflects on how the early vision of universal machines evolved into today’s internet and artificial intelligence.

本文为作者为纪念艾伦•图灵诞辰一百周年所写，全文转自豆瓣（http://www.douban.com/note/221426825/）。

关于本文

本文的写作除参考以下书目，还从1957届校友Joshua Dranoff教授、1958届校友Jerry Porter教授处得到了宝贵的原始资料。1988届校友W. Barksdale Maynard先生、普林斯顿档案馆的Daniel Linke先生在史料核对上提供了有益的线索。

参考书目

Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.

Hargittai, Istvan. The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: the Enigma. New York: Walker & Company, 2000.

Macrae, Norman. John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1999.

Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

Ulam, S.M.. Adventures of a Mathematician. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.