How were the principles of von Neumann

Probably I will not be mistaken if I say that most people at the household level believe that the computer and everything connected with it are the achievements of science of the last decades of the last century. In fact, von Neumann's principles, computer work, theoretical foundations of building computer networks, were formulated in the first half of the twentieth century.

The main developer of the theory of computing systems at that time became the famous mathematician from the United States John von Neumann. By the way, it should be said that in part this happened relatively accidentally. Neiman was included in the scientific group in 1944, which worked on the creation of the first tube electronic computer ENIAC. Somehow during a routine discussion with colleagues the scientist not very confidently proposed a fundamentally new concept of creating a device for computing. To Neumann's surprise, his partners G. Goldstein and A. Burks supported the idea of Neumann, and two years later a scientific article appeared. It proposed completely unknown earlier principles of creating a computing device, and then received the name "von Neumann's principles." It has already been more than half a century since the first public presentation of Neumann's ideas, but to this day, such aspects as the architecture of the von Neumann principles, are the classical theory of building computer systems. The main difference of the new concept was that it was proposed to move away from the usual decimal system of information storage and switch to binary. It was more convenient for such use and provided much greater opportunities to increase the volume of this information, both in the aspect of its storage and transmission.

In addition, von Neumann's principles enabled him to process not only numerical information, but also text, sound, and others.

Another significant discovery of Neumann was his proposed decision to store the information itself. Previously, this work was carried out almost manually, by interconnecting the necessary components of the computer with each other to ensure the exchange of information that was stored in each of these compartments. On the already mentioned ENIAC computer, this procedure took at least several days, and very often during this procedure the technique broke down - the electronic tubes went out of order. Neumann suggested that the switching program should also be encoded as a binary code and stored in the computer itself.

The scientist not only formulated ideas, which later became widely known as von Neumann principles, but also developed the technological structure of a computer, this concept is more often referred to as the "computer architecture". The main components of the new architecture, according to Neiman, should be:

- control device;

- logical device;

- The central processor;

- a complex of memory, including internal and external;

- input / output devices.

In the construction so constructed, the computer reads special instructions from memory, and then executes them by the processor. The order of execution of commands is determined by a special command counter. The presence of such a device is now one of the hallmarks of the computer architecture proposed by Neumann.

In general, developed and, in fact, tested and implemented by himself, solutions for the architecture of computers, have become so universal and fundamental that even today in a professional environment, machines created according to these principles are called von Neumann machines. This does not apply only to those where there is no team counter.

A possible departure from these principles is possible only in the future, when the idea of logical processing of information will be based on the development of the theory of computing systems .