Re:Jon Von Neumann (Score 1)

"...Eventually it was von Neumannn's genius for organizing material and his penchant for producing reports which led him to write down the results of all these design meetings in a document which he called "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in June of 1945. It was this document which first described, in detail, the concept of the stored program digital computer.

As the name implies, the report was designed only as a draft of a more complete description which was to be presented to their military sponsors, but it was circulated to the Moore School staff and to several others not directly associated with the EDVAC project. Because von Neumann is listed as the only author, he has become associated with the concept of the stored program to such an extent that subsequent computers based upon this design were often referred to as von Neumann machins - as mentioned earlier, he never claimed to have invented the concepts, only wrote them down. Needless to say, several other members of the Moore school staff were annoyed to find little or no mention of their names associated with their contributions in this document, and this has lead to some hostile battles, which still rage today, about who actually was responsible for what in EDVAC's design."

(Williams, Michael R.; A History of Computing Techonlogy, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997)

It is unquestionable that von Neumann was a brilliant man who contributed greatly to the field of mathematics and such famous projects as the development of the atomic bomb and EDVAC. However, the concept of the stored program computer cannot be wholey attributed to him with any certainty, and as such, I can definately see why he was not included in this poll.