The stored program concept

Abstract

The history and early development of the stored program concept are briefly described. This refers to the ability of a calculating machine to store its instructions in its internal memory and process them in its arithmetic unit, so that in the course of a computation they may be not just executed but also modified at electronic speeds. John von Neumann, a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, participated in the discussions in which the idea was elaborated, wrote the first report of the concept, placed it in a theoretical context, and built his own computer, which was the early model for a number of others, including the important commercially manufactured IBM 701. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly perhaps first conceived of the stored program concept and developed most of the plans for implementing it in the Edvac, and later incorporated it in the Univac and other computers produced by their company. Several British computer scientists, notably Maurice Wilkes, were the first to implement the idea in machines initially designed to embody this feature. >