"Turing's Cathedral," by George Dyson Alan W. Richards/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University Universal machine: John von Neumann and his high-speed computer, circa 1952. It's anyone's guess whether our digital world ends with a bang, a whimper or a singularity. One thing's for sure: It began with a double entendre. The digital age can be traced to a machine built circa 1951 in Princeton, N.J. That machine was given the bureaucratic-­sounding name the Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer, and was known by the acronym Maniac, meaning something wild and uncontrollable - which it proved to be. But the crucial double entendre was contained in the computer's memory. For the first time, numbers could mean numbers or instructions. Data could be a noun or a verb. That turned out to be incredibly important, as George Dyson makes clear in his latest book, "Turing's Cathedral," a groundbreaking history of the Princeton computer. Though the English mathematician Alan Turing gets title billing, Dyson's true protagonist is the Hungarian-­American John von Neumann, presented here as the Steve Jobs of early computers - a man who invented almost nothing, yet whose vision changed the world. Von Neumann was no stereotypical mathematician. He was urbane, witty, wealthy and (literally) entitled. At his 1926 doctoral exam, the mathematician David Hilbert is said to have asked but one question: "Pray, who is the candidate's tailor?" He had never seen such beautiful evening clothes. Already one of the century's great mathematicians, von Neumann pursued a career in academia before turning to consult on the building of bombs (and computers) during World War II. At the time, the Army had begun work on a "digital electronic computer" known as the Eniac that was programmed, via switches and cables, by hand. After Nagasaki, von Neumann sold the United States military on a more powerful "stored program" computer, one that could read coded sequences from high-speed memory and thus more rapidly, and automatically, run numerical simulations essential to the design of nuclear weapons. Von Neumann also sold his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, on building the Faustian device in Princeton. Another institute scholar, the logician Kurt Gödel, is also a vital figure in Dyson's story. Gödel is known for his "incompleteness theorem," which demonstrated the existence of true statements that cannot be proved in any mathematically rigorous way. But it's not Gödel's conclusion that matters here so much as the trick he used to achieve it: He invented the mathematical double entendre. In his famous proof, numbers carry two meanings - the familiar one designating a quantity, and an encoded one designating a logical proposition (e.g., "No number can be multiplied by 0 to produce 7"). In this way Gödel commingled the data and "code" of arithmetic. Turing took this notion and in 1936 applied it to a hypothetical universe of "automata." In his conception, a simple robot (a "Turing machine") is supplied with a paper tape. The tape is a crude form of memory, its contents doubling as data and code. Turing proved that this minimalist design is a "universal" computer, capable of performing any calculation. The basic ideas of stored-program computers were therefore in place before von Neumann got to work. Yet it was he who had the prestige and the connections to turn the Turing machine into reality. Because city-destroying bombs couldn't be built by trial and error, computers were required to simulate the physics of detonation and blast waves. A computer helped build the bomb, and the bomb necessitated ever more advanced computers. Von Neumann and two colleagues codified their machine's architecture in a report issued in 1946. They could be called the fathers of the open-source movement, as they ultimately declined to seek any patents. Within a few years of the plans" being shared, over a dozen siblings to the Princeton machine existed across the globe. Indeed, the processors in every cellphone, tablet and laptop still hew closely to von Neumann's architecture. Not all the ideas von Neumann donated to the public domain were exclusively his. "Johnny was rephrasing our logic, but it was still the same logic," John W. Mauchly, a creator of the Eniac, complained. Mauchly's colleague John Eckert added: "He grasped what we were doing quite quickly. I didn't know he was going to go out and more or less claim it as his own. William Poundstone's latest book is "Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?"