The “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” is a 1945 manuscript written by John von Neumann during the design of the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The hosted report describes a machine built from a central arithmetic part, a central control part, a memory, and input and output organs, the functional units that define the design now known as the von Neumann architecture.
The report’s key idea is that instructions and data are held together in the same read-write memory. Because the program lives in memory rather than in wiring or plugboards, the machine can be given a new task by loading new instructions instead of being physically rebuilt. This stored-program principle is what made general-purpose computers practical.
The document was circulated in mid-1945 under von Neumann’s name alone, and that sole-author credit remains controversial. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly had been developing stored-program ideas for the EDVAC before and during von Neumann’s involvement, and many historians hold that the report folded together a collaborative effort under a single name.
Despite the dispute over attribution, the report became one of the most influential documents in computing. Its layout of memory, arithmetic, control, and input/output was adopted, directly or indirectly, by nearly every digital computer that followed.