Comment by gumby
9 years ago
What they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers.
While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!
Please feel free to include in your comedy CV that you managed to sneak this one past a computer science professor until the third read-through. Kudos. :)
This is an excellent and under-appreciated joke. Bravo.
What's the joke?
von Neumann architecture vs. Harvard architecture (of computers)