John von Neumann

Today in 1945, John von Neumann published “A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” Campbell-Kelly and Aspray call it in Computer: The History of the Information Machine “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In A History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi says it “is often cited as the founding document of modern computing.” What became to be known as the “von Neumann Architecture,” separated the processing of information from its storage, leading to an ongoing imbalance between the speed of the computer’s storage unit and the speed of its processing unit, each advancing along different technological trajectories.