thanks so much for linking this. I have always been a fan of the history of computing (e.g., Moshe Vardi mentioned Charles Peirce in a talk once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce, and I have seen a reconstruction of one of Leibniz' calculators [http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrech...), but I did not know that Konrad Zuse got a patent on the concept of pipelining in 1949. (AFAIR Hennesy and Pattern's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" cites Tomasulo's algorithm from 1967)