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WEEK 5
TOPIC: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTERS:
CONTENT:
ELECTRONIC COUNTING DEVICES AND MODERN COMPUTER
- John Von Neumann machine
- Modern machines
SUB-TOPIC 1
JOHN VON NEUMANN’S MACHINE
In 1945, mathematician John von Neumann undertook a study of computation that demonstrated that a computer could have a simple, fixed structure, yet be able to execute any kind of computation given properly programmed control without the need for hardware modification. Von Neumann contributed a new understanding of how practical fast computers should be organized and built; these ideas, often referred to as the stored-program technique, became fundamental for future generations of high-speed digital computers and were universally adopted. The primary advance was the provision of a special type of machine instruction called conditional control transfer which permitted the program sequence to be interrupted and reinitiated at any point, similar to the system suggested by Babbage for his analytical engine and by storing all instruction programs together with data in the same memory unit, so that, when desired, instructions could be arithmetically modified in the same way as data. Thus, data was the same as program.
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