Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

On a pre­vi­ous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete mod­el for a com­puter. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beau­ti­ful, but it had its dis­ad­vant­ages, and an unfor­tu­nate leg­acy. Today, John Backus will lead our jour­ney through these mat­ters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thor­ough cri­tique was addressed, ironically, […]

The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC - Von Neumann

Von Neumann, anoth­er star from Göttingen, gave the next import­ant step in com­pu­ta­tion after Turing (check­out my pre­vi­ous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can­’t talk about com­puters without talk­ing about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an ana­log­ous way to […]

Cuts

Intaglio and relief print­ing are two com­plete oppos­ites in my prac­tice. I greatly admire those who man­age to con­vey tex­tures in a wood­cut (e.g. sheets like this by Klaus Magnus: Berlin façade, 1973), but so far I fail to go very far bey­ond out­lines. This lim­it­a­tion makes my relief prints the by far most conceptual […]