John von Neumann, EDVAC, and the IAS Machine(linuxvoice.com)
linuxvoice.com
John von Neumann, EDVAC, and the IAS Machine
http://www.linuxvoice.com/john-von-neumann/?pk_campaign=hn&pk_kwd=vn2
http://www.linuxvoice.com/john-von-neumann/?pk_campaign=hn&pk_kwd=vn2
"It was developed to run artillery calculations, but due to the involvement of von Neumann and Los Alamos, in the end the first calculation it ran was computations for the hydrogen bomb, using around a million punch cards."
A more significant reason might be that while it was commissioned during WWII (middle of '43), it wasn't completed until half a year after the war ended.
"Some of the famous IAS machines include MANIAC (at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; von Neumann was involved with this one too and was responsible for the name), the IBM 701 (IBM’s first commercial scientific computer, with 17 installations), and ORACLE (in Oak Ridge National Laboratory)."
The Whirlwind project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I beat all of the above mentioned computers in building a bit parallel computer. Also developed magnetic core memory for computers, significantly increased the lifetime of vacuum tubes (electrodes had too much silicon), was the grandfather of the minicomputer, and per the book on it, a talk by the primary inventor, Jay Forrester, and what I've otherwise gathered, pretty much defined the modular way we build computers. Forrester commented that he left the field afterwords because all of the interesting things had been done.