Sorting a list is one of the tasks computers do most: names in a register, prices in a search, election results. In 1945, when the EDVAC was still on paper, von Neumann wanted to show that the machine in his report was good for work that was not just arithmetic, and wrote by hand a program to sort and merge lists. It is one of the first programs written for a stored-program computer, and the method he used, now called merge sort, is still one of the most widely used.