Neil Gershenfeld

He wrote a horrible memo called the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which is how you program a very early computer.

In it, he essentially roughly took Turing's architecture and built it into a machine and

So the legacy of that is the computer somebody's using to watch this is spending much of its effort moving information from storage transistors to processing transistors, even though they have the same computational complexity.

So in computer science, when you learn about computing, there's a ridiculous taxonomy of about a hundred different models of computation

but they're all fictions.

In physics, a patch of space occupies space, it stores state, it takes time to transit, and you can interact.

That is the only model of computation that's physical.

Everything else is a fiction.

So I really came to appreciate that a few years back when I did a keynote for the annual meeting of the supercomputer industry and then went into the halls and spent time with the supercomputer builders and came to appreciate that.

Oh, see, if you're familiar with the movie, The Metropolis, people would frolic upstairs in the gardens and down in the basement, people would move levers.

And that's how computing exists today, that we pretend software is not physical.

It's separate from hardware.

And the whole canon of computer science is based on this fiction that bits aren't constrained by atoms, but all sorts of scaling issues in computing come from that boundary, but all sorts of opportunities come from that boundary.

And so you can trace it all the way back to Turing's machine making this mistake between the head and the tape.

He never called it von Neumann's architecture.

He wrote about it in this dreadful memo, and then he wrote beautifully about other things we'll talk about.

Now, to end a long answer, Turing and von Neumann both knew this.

So all of the canon of computer scientists credits them for what was never meant to be a computer architecture.

Both Turing and von Neumann ended their life studying...

exactly how software becomes hardware.