How the Von Neumann Architecture Changed Computing Forever
The underlying architecture of almost all modern computers was described in the 1940s and has barely changed. The idea revolutionised computing at the time and paved the path for modern computers and programs.
In the early days of computing, computers were designed for a particular task and could not perform any other task without physical changes to the computer; these types of computers are known as “fixed-program machines”. The most famous fixed-program machine is the Colossus, a set of computers designed to decipher encrypted radio messages in World War 2.
The road to general-purpose computing
Alan Turing, whose work enabled the creation of the Colossus computers, earlier in 1936 wrote a paper that described a hypothetical machine called the “universal computing machine” (more commonly known as the Universal Turing machine). John von Neumann, a fellow mathematician, had become familiar with the Universal Turing machine and had met Turing in the late 1930s.
In the early 1940s, John Adam Presper Eckert Jr and John Mauchly were developing the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. Eckert and Mauchly first described the concept of a stored-program computer. Von…
