In June 1945 John von Neumann circulated a typed draft, distributed on 30 June by Herman Goldstine, titled “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” EDVAC was the planned successor to ENIAC, under development at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The report - about a hundred pages, written while von Neumann commuted by train - set out in abstract, logical terms how such a machine should be organized.
Its central contribution was the stored-program concept: a single addressable memory that holds both the instructions and the data, so the machine can read, and even modify, its own program. The report described the machine in terms of functional “organs” - a central arithmetic unit, a central control, memory, and input and output - and notably described the logical elements by analogy to idealized neurons, borrowing the notation of the 1943 McCulloch-Pitts model. This division of a computer into arithmetic, control, memory, and I/O became known as the von Neumann architecture and underlies almost every general-purpose computer built since.
The report also had an unintended legal effect. Because Goldstine put von Neumann’s name on it and circulated it widely, it counted as a public disclosure of the design. Filed more than a year before the EDVAC patent application, it helped place the stored-program idea in the public domain and was later cited in invalidating computer patents - cementing the architecture as shared property of the whole field rather than any one company’s.