von Neuman Machines

(This and the next node contain historical and conceptual background which the terminally impatient may wish to skip.)

Johnny von Neuman introduced what has come to be called the "von Neuman architecture" for computers on one of the first vacuum-tube computers, and despite much grumbling and many attempts to dethrone it, it has remained the mainstay of computing ever since.

The essential components of the von Neuman architecture are:

• A single data store of addressable elements containing both the information to be operated upon and the instructions specifying the operations to be performed.
• A pointer called the program counter designating the instruction currently being executed.
• Some sort of machinery which repeatedly changes the data store as specified by the current instruction, and then modifies the program counter to point to a new instruction.

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