And believe me, he’s ignorant of computers! What happened was, Johnny von Neumann—they never even told him! I’ll put a box outside my office, and any question you have about sex, just put the question in the box and I will answer the questions.” Well! Well, I skipped fifth grade.

One time, my brothers and sisters and I were going down to Grandma’s house. The first one that was picked had a very nice apartment in West Philadelphia; and housing was very bad, and Aberdeen was a hellhole as far as everybody was concerned—because people had been down there; I mean, it’s just a bare Army base—so she decided that she wasn’t going to take it. Anyway, the amount that I earned, and the amount that Aunt Gretchen loaned me, saw me through two years of college. And then Kay took me home with her, one weekend. The President was there, the Vice President of Development, the Vice President of Sales, and all the product line managers.

ape! What happens to our kids when they start out in computers? He loved us, and we loved him. He drew all of the logical diagrams for the UNIVAC in a month. He worked hard, but he was adorable.

They would count the bits in the memory and make sure the number was always odd. Now, they never told us what the problem was, although we went through all the rigmarole of what you had to do on the ENIAC and on the punch card equipment Or, maybe he would make the turn, and we would go flying off onto the wire. Anyway, I didn’t know this till years later: Nick Metropolis wrote in an article about the misconceptions about the ENIAC and about the computer industry—one of which was that Johnny von Neumann did not invent the stored-program computer—but one of the things he says in there, which I didn’t know, was that he and Klara von Neumann had learned to program the ENIAC. Well, you mentioned your aunt—I forgot the name . How do you feel the field of computing has changed? Well no, it wasn’t that. So anyway, they came back—and I can remember the day we set up the machine. So then they were trying to build the damn thing. Well, he used to give the most horrendous talks you’d ever seen in your life! I mean, they were little trays, and you’d set them up once, and maybe it’d take you five minutes! We got up and put on our coats. But anyway, Pres said “I’ll teach you.” We didn’t know anything about it. . He never did. If wrong, we would go back and put the breakpoint in earlier. physicist—who had had his own company. To test how fast the processor was.

He was as cute as a button!

So you would send a signal out from the last operation, and then you would pick it off every place you wanted to stimulate the next operation to occur.

She took the Kansas City Star, which was a weekly paper, and she said, “Well, if it’s important, it’ll be in the weekly newspaper.” [laughs.] I proceeded to tell them all of this. She had left my college and become President of Coty College in South Missouri. . No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center. So I want you to check the logic of the UNIVAC.” When we checked the UNIVAC logic, we found no major flaws in the logic of the UNIVAC—and [Bob] had drawn them all in a month!

So we were all busily working away, and we got along fabulously. Robust? But Betty continued her career, you know. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. I’m not a "people" person; I’m a "thing" person. She had a longstanding interest in writing. He saw Johnny von Neumann on the platform, so he went over and started telling him about the ENIAC. You can’t believe that people say they live in New York and then get on the subway and ride for an hour! So it’s fantastic. [laughs].

But you think this is fairly accurate, this ENIAC book?