Today in 1945, “A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” was published.
In Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray call it “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In The History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi says it “is often cited as the founding document of modern computing.”
More recently, Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope describe it in ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer as “the most influential document in the history of computer design.” They write:
[Herman] Goldstein circulated a mimeographed version of the report in June, taking advantage of its unclassified status to distribute it quite widely. Initially, 31 copies were sent out… The circulated version had von Neumann’s name and a date of June 30 on the cover and gave no credit to other members of the EDVAC team… Rather than reading the First Draft as the presentation of a single “stored program concept,” we see in it three distinct clusters of ideas… Each of these paradigms can be seen as a fairly direct response to ENIAC’s shortcomings: its size and complexity, its small temporary storage capability, and the difficulty of setting it up for new problems… John von Neumann was not aesthete, but his intellectual response to ENIAC might be likened to that of a Calvinist zealot who, having taken charge of a gaudy cathedral, goes to work whitewashing frescos and lopping off ornamental flourishes.
The Calvinist approach to computer design, 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. From the rise of computer storage-focused companies such as EMC to the invention of the Google File system (later giving birth to “big data” foundational technologies MapReduce and Hadoop), the history of the computer industry has revolved around the trade-offs between where and how data is stored and where and how it is processed and manipulated.