SWR/BR: Turing's Cathedral

Just completed reading Turing'sCathedral by George Dyson (son of famed physicist FreemanDyson). What a great read that is...especially if you've been involved w/ computers for any length of time (I have.....hooked my card reader up, via its USB port, to AlGore's new InterNet thing back in the early '60's...by crackey). AlanTuring was a British mathematician in the '30's-'50's who wrote a seminal paper that provided the mathematical basis for computing machines (i.e. computers). There was a huge amount of engineering going from Turing's paper to the first actual cumputer, the ENIAC, at the IAS (Institute of Advanced Study) at Princeton, Einstein & Oppenheimer's home base. This was mostly done under the vision of Johnny vonNeumann. The LosAlamos version was implemented in the early '50's, named the MANIAC. Some of the people involved were people I met when I first came to LosAlamos...so the read was of particular interest to me.
To make this rambling BR SWR, one of those first brilliant engineers was one HewittCrane. I thought that name sounded a bit familiar and then it dawned on me...HewCrane was one of the founding partners of RidgeVnyds in the early '60's, whilst he was at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) along w/ DaveBennion and NormRosen. One of his main contributions to ENIAC was rewiring the IBM card reader to read the cards in a row-wise order, rather than the much slower (by a factor of column-wise order. He then went on at SRI to develop the system for clearing checks between banks electronically.
An interesting factoid from the book: In the early '50's, they were doing climate modeling on the ENIAC. Some of those seminal calculations suggested that since the beginning of the industrial age, there had been enough CO2 dumped into the air from power plants/autos that the climate would start to warm (global warming it's now called). Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Johnny vonNeumann poo-pooed the idea and claimed that the oceans were a sufficient'y absorbing sink for CO2 that it would not happen. Sorta surprised none of the Republican candidates who dismiss global warming haven't cited Johnny as an "authoritative" source for their denials...'ceptin' I seriously doubt any of them have a clue as to who Johnny vonNeuman is.
Anyway...the book is a great read..even if you're an attourney!!
Tom

first actual cumputer, the ENIAC depending on the definition of actual and computer