Stored-program (von Neumann) architecture
Arquitectura de programa almacenado (von Neumann)
- Date
- 1945 · confidence high
- Place
- Moore School, Philadelphia, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, United States
- Credited to
- John von Neumann, with Eckert and Mauchly (First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC)
- People
- 👤 John Presper Eckert1919–1995👤 John von Neumann1903–1957👤 John William Mauchly1907–1980
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Design in which instructions and data reside in the same memory and a central unit processes them sequentially. It is the logical model of practically every computer built since.
Eckert and Mauchly claimed the idea of the stored program; the 1945 report bore only von Neumann's name and gave him public credit.
What it led to
- Programming as an activity separate from hardware and the emergence of software
- Standardisation of the computer industry for decades
- The von Neumann bottleneck that drives caches, parallelism and AI accelerators