The stored-program architecture holds that a computer should keep both its instructions and the data it works on in the same read-write memory, rather than having its instructions fixed by wiring or supplied on a separate medium it cannot itself alter. John von Neumann set out the design in June 1945 in First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, describing a machine built from an arithmetic unit, a control unit, a memory holding both numbers and instructions, and input and output mechanisms, developed from discussions with the ENIAC engineers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania. Because a program held in ordinary memory can be read and modified by the machine running it, the design let a computer's behavior be changed by loading new data rather than by rewiring it, and it became the basic layout, since called the von Neumann architecture, that has organized nearly every general purpose computer built since.
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Babbage's Analytical Engine, designed between 1837 and 1840 but never built, already separated a punched-card program from a store holding data and a mill that acted on it, and historians of computing describe its overall structure as essentially the shape that came to dominate electronic computer design a century later; the specific step von Neumann's 1945 report added was holding the program in the same read-write store as the data, rather than reading it from cards.
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