THE VON NEUMANN MODEL

Brief history
The Von Neumann architecture were first published by Neumann himself in the year 1946. Firstly, in
1943 Presper Eckert and John Mauchly created the first general electronic computer which was
basically made of hard-wired programs and the settings of dials and switches, and ran on a binary
system. This was referred to as the ENIAC (Electronic numerical Integrator and computer). Further,
the year 1944 saw the beginnings of the EDVAC (Electronic discrete variable automatic computer).
This machine used the decimal system instead of the binary system, and included the storage of
programs in the memory. Following these ideas, in 1945 John Von Neumann decided to write a
report on the concept of stored program. Which was then published in 1946. This report by
Neumann was known as the First draft of a report on EDVAC.

Basic Components
Von Neumann in his report basically proposed a fundamental structure which was referred to as the
Von Neumann machine and/or model. The model consisted of five important parts, namely:
memory, processing unit, input, output and control unit. These five parts can be concisely dissolved
into three parts, as the input and output operations are regulated in the processing unit, hence, the
three parts would be: a memory containing instructions and data, a processing unit for carrying out
the logical and arithmetical operations, and finally a control unit for understanding the instructions.

The Von Neumann model could be easily translated and understood through an overall block
diagram.
Memory
This entails of the elements for storage, along with two registers: MAR (Memory Address Register)
for addressing individual locations and the MDR (Memory Data Register) for storing the contents of a
memory location on its way from the storage or to the storage. Both the MAR and the MDR contain
of 16 bits.

Processing Unit
This entails of a functional unit that can perform arithmetic and logical operations and eight registers
in order to store temporal values that will be used as operands for sub-sequent instructions.

Input and Output

Control Unit