This page relates to an audio recording of John von Neumann's speech on the occasion of the first public showing of the IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORD) December 2, 1954. The original recording was made available by the late Mike Muuss. As far as I know, this is the only audio recording of von Neumann publically available on the web.
The original recording made available by Muuss is divided in
several separate segments, and uses the somewhat obsolete
.au audio format. For convenience, I am making
available here an alternative complete recording
in the more common .mp3 format (25 minutes running
time, 12MByte download).
Some observations:
Muuss presents the recording in six separate parts; but part 6 appears to be simply a repeat of the last minute or so of part 5 (which does run to the closing applause from the speech). Accordingly, in the complete version presented here, I have omitted part 6.
Muuss includes a transcript of the separate parts of the speech; but it is important to note that this transcript is very incomplete: there is much more content in the audio.
Muuss refers to a full transcript being available in "von Neumann's collected works, vol. V, MacMillan 1961". However, this page from the University of Washington Quantum System Engineering Group states that:
The audio recording of von Neumann's speech is of great historical value because it is substantially more candid and uninhibited than the Bowdlerized transcript that appears in von Neumann's collected works.
2009-12-08
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