The more I read about early computing, the more fascinated I become that the major problem innovators needed to solve was memory, not computing per-se.
Exactly. Electronic arithmetic hardware predates WWII. IBM had an electronic multiplier working. ENIAC was a giant plugboard machine. It's not that people didn't think of stored-program computers before Turing. It's that there was nothing in which to store the program.
IBM built machines with plugboard memory. Relay memory. Electromechanical memory. Punched-card memory. Punched tape memory. Drum memory. Look at the history of the IBM 600 series machines, a long battle to get work done cost-effectively with very limited memory.
Delay line memory was sequential and slow. Willams tubes were insanely expensive per bit. Core memory was a million dollars a megabyte until the early 1970s and didn't get much cheaper. There was plated wire memory, thin film memory, and various ways to build manually updated ROMs. All expensive.
Then came semiconductor IC memory (1024 bits in one package!) and things started to move.
Exactly. Electronic arithmetic hardware predates WWII. IBM had an electronic multiplier working. ENIAC was a giant plugboard machine. It's not that people didn't think of stored-program computers before Turing. It's that there was nothing in which to store the program.
IBM built machines with plugboard memory. Relay memory. Electromechanical memory. Punched-card memory. Punched tape memory. Drum memory. Look at the history of the IBM 600 series machines, a long battle to get work done cost-effectively with very limited memory.
Delay line memory was sequential and slow. Willams tubes were insanely expensive per bit. Core memory was a million dollars a megabyte until the early 1970s and didn't get much cheaper. There was plated wire memory, thin film memory, and various ways to build manually updated ROMs. All expensive.
Then came semiconductor IC memory (1024 bits in one package!) and things started to move.