Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?

On a pre­vi­ous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete mod­el for a com­puter. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beau­ti­ful, but it had its dis­ad­vant­ages, and an unfor­tu­nate leg­acy. Today, John Backus will lead our jour­ney through these mat­ters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thor­ough cri­tique was addressed, ironically, […]

The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC - Von Neumann

Von Neumann, anoth­er star from Göttingen, gave the next import­ant step in com­pu­ta­tion after Turing (check­out my pre­vi­ous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can­’t talk about com­puters without talk­ing about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an ana­log­ous way to […]