[Simh] new papers on von Neumann's programs and machine

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

[This posting is slightly off-target, because it is about virtual
machines, and not Simh specifically.  Nevertheless, the poster feels
that it may well be of interest to list readers.]

The latest issue of the IEEE journal Computer arrived in my mailbox a
couple of days ago.  It contains an interesting article that describes
an emulator for John von Neumann's IAS (Institute for Advanced Study)
computer, designed in the late 1940s, but not fully operational until
1952 (see, e.g.,

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAS_machine

).

The article also describes the testing of several early programs
written by von Neumann and his close collaborator, Herman Goldstine.
The article authors report finding several bugs in the programs (all
of which were published about five years before actual hardware became
operational).  Some of the errors arise from transcription from
technical reports into the volumes of the Collected Works of John von
Neumann but others were real bugs in the original programs.  This
demonstrates once again that unless published program code has
actually been run on a digital computer, it is probably wrong.

The new article contains further references, one of which is about the
emulator itself, and is included below.  There is also an important
earlier third paper that is not cited by the new article.  Here is a
summary of those references, with links:

	Donald E. Knuth
	[John] von Neumann's first computer program
	ACM Computing Surveys 2(4) 247--260 December 1970
	http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/356580.356581

	Barry S. Fagin and Dale J. Skrien
	IASSim: a Programmable Emulator for the Princeton IAS/von Neumann Machine
	Proceedings of the 42nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science
	Education (SIGCSE 11), 359--364 (2011)
	http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1953163.1953271
	http://www.cs.colby.edu/djskrien/CPUSim/
	http://www.cs.colby.edu/djskrien/IASSim/

	Barry Fagin and Dale Skrien
	Debugging on the Shoulders of Giants: von Neumann's Programs 65 Years Later
	[IEEE] Computer 45(11) 59--68 November 2012
	http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MC.2012.69

----------------------------------------

P.S. I maintain many bibliographies, one of which is on virtual
machines:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/virtual-machines.bib
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/virtual-machines.html

[They look similar on the screen, but the HTML version has live
hypertext links, and the .bib version is needed for BibTeX
processing.]

That bibliography was first created on 10-Apr-2006, and now has almost
1000 entries.  Its contents are mined from an SQL database
representing a collection of almost 700,000 entries covering several
hundred journals, plus many author- and subject-specific
bibliographies.

There is also a complete bibliography of von Neumann's works in the
BibNet Project archives:

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/v/von-neumann-john.bib
	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/v/von-neumann-john.html

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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