Stored-program computer
A computer design in which the procedure to be followed, the program, is kept in the same memory as the data. Almost every computer today works this way.
The earliest computers had to be rewired for each new calculation. In 1945 a draft report circulated by John von Neumann described a design in which the procedure is held in memory as numbers and the machine reads and executes it step by step[1]. The machine stays the same; only the job is swapped.
The idea grew out of joint work with J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly and others, and the fact that the draft carried only one name later fuelled a dispute over who deserved the credit. The design has a known weakness: the path that shuttles data between the processing part and the memory limits the speed of the whole. That is one reason memory speed matters so much in AI computing.
Related terms
- Turing machineA very simple imaginary machine that does nothing but read and write symbols on a tape. Alan Turing devised it in 1936 to define what it means for something to be computable.
- Integrated circuitA circuit in which transistors and other components, together with the wiring between them, are all built into a single piece of semiconductor — a chip.
- DRAMA memory cell that stores one bit as charge on a capacitor. Simple and cheap to make, it serves as the main memory of computers.