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Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, et al., compile their report entitled "Automatic High Speed Computing: A Progress Report on the EDVAC." Yet, the story of the "computer word" is, like many in the histories of computings, neither a classic origin story nor one with a sole author/inventor or single conclusion. Delving into the histories of computings archive, it is possible to identify a narrow time frame in which the term begins its emergence, sometime between late spring 1945, when John von Neumann drafts his notes that will later be referred to as the "First Draft of the EDVAC Report" and September, 1945, when J. Tukey and byte from a JIBM memo drafted by Werner Bucholz) (Tropp), those surrounding the computer word have not been well documented in either the histories of computings or fields related to it, including writing and media studies. Also unlike the terms bits and bytes, the origins of which have become part of the print record (bits is said to date from a JanuBell Labs memo drafted by John W. Instead the term remains a technical one, familiar to every computer scientist and technician but not to the average consumer. Unlike the terms bits and bytes, the computer word, which is defined by the IEEE as "a unit of storage, typically a set of bits, that is suitable for processing by a given computer," (Illustration 1) has not yet become part of popular discourse.
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