🛠️ Invention or technique

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
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Sources✓ verified 2026-09-25