John von Neumann wrote the article “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” describing, but in abstract, non-operational terms, his computer with a program stored on board (and therefore modifiable by the computer itself as if it were data). The first complete specifications arrived with Alan Turing at the end of 1945. Von Neumann’s EDVAC had a CPU, while Turing’s ACE had its arithmetic functions distributed across several hardware units. George Dyson wrote: “The stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things; our universe would never be the same.”
