information. The problem with the ENIAC was that the average life of a vacuum tube is 3000 hours, and a vacuum tube would then burn out once every 15 minutes. It would take on average 15 minutes to find the burnt out tube and replace it. Enthralled by the success of ENIAC, the mathematician John Von Neumann undertook, in 1945, a study of computation that showed that a computer should have a very basic, fixed physical construction, and yet be able to carry out any kind of computation by means of a proper programmed control without the need for any change in the unit itself. Von Neumann contributed a new consciousness of how sensible, yet fast computers should be organized and assembled. These ideas, usually referred to as the stored-program technique, became important for future generations of high-speed digital computers and were wholly adopted. The Stored-Program technique involves many features of computer design and function besides the one that it is named after. In combination, these features make very high speed operations attainable. An impression may be provided by considering what 1,000 operations per second means. If each instruction in a job program were used once in concurrent order, no human programmer could induce enough instruction to keep the computer busy. Arrangements must be made, consequently, for parts of the job program (called subroutines) to be used repeatedly in a manner that depends on the way the computation goes. Also, it would clearly be helpful if instructions could be changed if needed during a computation to make them behave differently. Von Neumann met these two requirements by making a special type of machine instruction, called a Conditional control transfer -- which allowed the program sequence to be stopped and started again at any point - and by...
