Von Neumann was quite a powerhouse of ideas. I read that transcript of the 1948 talk, and some of it was remarkably familiar and up to date while some of it was disorienting. Numerical analysis as we know it barely existed back then. It wasn't needed. Error correcting codes barely existed. Claude Shannon was just starting to publish his work on information theory. The transistor was introduced that same year. Meanwhile, I am typing this on a computer that can do billions of operations per second with an error rate so low that its designers barely needed to account for it in its design. Sometimes progress appears glacial, then one reads something like this and realizes how much has happened in 75 years.
