Hungarian-born, German – US mathematician and pioneer in computing. He was a famous mathematician at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton University, is credited with developing the modern concept of the stored program.
He was a professor from 1931, making contributions to quantum physics, logic, and meteorology. He also helped develop the US hydrogen bomb after World War II. His book on game theory, published in 1944, subsequently had a significant impact on economy theory.
In 1946 he proposed some of the central concepts of later computer development, particularly the advantages of the binary system for computer operation and the ‘stored program’, in which the computer retains in its memory the instruction for its operation.
A major problem with ENIAC was that every time its operators wanted to do a new series of computations, they had to rewrite it and reset switches in process that often took several hours.
It was Neumann who found solution to this problem: the stored program. With a stored program, the instructions for the computer are coded as numbers and stored inside the machine. The machines operating instructions are placed, or stored, in the same memory as the data to be processed, and they are written in the same binary notation.
The basic operations that the machine can perform are built into its circuitry; each operation is given a number; and the stored program can call for any operation by its number.
Stored programs thus give computers great flexibility. Both the program and the data could be stored in the computer’s memory. In such a stored-program computer, operators would feed in a new set of instructions when they wanted the computer execute a new program. Thus, they would not have to rewrite the machine. With this stored-program concept, the idea of software was born.
Von Neumann also recognized how important it was for computers to use binary notation, since the binary system corresponded to the “on”or “off” nature of electronic components. Since EDVAC, all computers have been designed to use binary notation.
The first stored-program computer, called EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic calculator), was completed in England, in 1949. Von Neumann’s machine, EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), was started in 1946 and completed in the United States in 1950. With these devices, the stage was set for the computer revolution and the explosive growth of the commercial computer industry.