The Stored Program Computer And Some Early Computational Abstractions

Andru Luvisi, ISO, SSU

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

The stored program computer held instructions and data in the same memory. This enabled programs to manipulate other programs (or even themselves!) and made it possible to decouple the external representation of a program from the actual instructions executed by the machine. This in turn allowed new forms of abstraction to be created and used by implementing them in software. I will discuss the creation of the stored program computer and some early software and hardware ideas related to computational abstraction.