The birth of random-access memory
John von Neumann usually gets credit for this and numerous other details still faithfully reproduced in our pocket supercomputers, but he was summarizing the work of many others mostly gagged by Brits&#x27; Official Secrets Act.<p>Von Neumann doesn&#x27;t need that recognition, having created several other still-lively fields single-handed. But the clarity of his presentation did make readers smarter, by making the profound innovations seem obvious. They were not.