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Date: 2025-01-11 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00025822
EVENTS
MOMATH: NYC ... NOVEMBER 6TH 2023

The von Neumanns ... The First Power Couple of the Computer Age


John and Klara Dan von Neumann

Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This event takes me back to the beginning of my career.

I graduated from CVambridge in 1961 after studying first engineering and subsequently economics. After a year working in an industrial management training program with Davy United, a company that built heavy machinery for the steel industry (e.g. rolling mills and blast furnaces) I joined Cooper Brothers & Co (CB&Co) as an 'articled clerk' in London to qualify as a Chartered Accountant.

During my time with CB&Co there was a lot of change going on. The Lyons organization had started using LEO to improve its productivity. LEO stood for Lyons Electronic Office and was used to administer the Lyons bread production and distribution operations.

CB&Co were the auditors for EMI ... Electical and Mechanical Industries ... the company that had developed radar that had been so important in defending the UK and especially London during WWII. I was part of the CB&Co audit team for EMI in 1962 (maybe 1963) and I was assigned to work on audit of the EMI Records subsidiary unit. The year end was September 30th, and the audit team was on site starting mid-October. EMI Records produced Beetle records during the era of BeetleMania and released a new record on October 1st. The day before that they had more than a million records in stock, and over the next few days delivered them all to retail stores and by mid-October they had all been shipped.

But EMI had also built a computer to do 'accounting' and this prototype computer was being used to do the accounting for EMI Records. I was specifically assigned to carry out all the normal audit procedures for EMI Records ... but now the normal 'books of account' ... the ledgers ... were all inside the computer of some sort of electronic form ... except they weren't! In the EMI Records computer system, everything was 'updated' as it changed and there was absolutely no 'audit trail'. More than a million Beetle records simply disappeared from all the accounting system! Needless to say, CB&Co as the auditors were in something of a panic ... and I was in the middle of the storm. I remember recommending that immediately and pending the programming change to add an audit trail element, they should limit access to everything to do with the computer equipment including padlocks for the doors. I also recall working to rebuild the transaction activity so that the as of September 30th record inventory could be calculated!

CB&Co soon became Coopers and Lybrand (C&L) and then many years later PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Peter Burgess
EVENT: Monday, November 6 at 6:00 pm

The First Power Couple of the Computer Age


Hosted by Ingrid Daubechies with guest and author Ananyo Bhattacharya

John von Neumann is widely recognized not only as a mathematical genius, but as a seminal founder of the computer age. In contrast, the role of his wife Klara Dan von Neumann — the first person to write a modern computer program — remains woefully unappreciated. Join MoMath’s Distinguished Visiting Professor Ingrid Daubechies and Ananyo Bhattacharya, author of the biography, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, for a fascinating discussion about the roles this remarkable couple played in catalyzing the development of the modern computer.

Ananyo will be available after the session to sign copies of his book, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, available for purchase through Additions, the shop at MoMath.

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