John Von Neuman - Jolly looking fella.....!
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
Henry V - Shakespeare
A very important bloke in the history of computing.
Hey why don't we STORE programs in blocks of memory.
Previously data and program instructions were stored in separate memories, however there is no difference between numbers that code for variables and those that code for instructions so they can use the same memory. These led to the introduction of compilers which take in higher level languages (text) and produce the binary codes needed for the computers.
Linear processing of instructions - FETCH-DECODE-EXECUTE using a single processor.
The processor needs special registers to allow this to work: (see Section 1.4)
The overall design of a computer is called its computer architecture.
The architecture of the computer in the book 'How Computers Work: Processor and Main Memory (including the second edition) and described so far is called the 'Von Neumann' architecture.
The 'registers on bus' architecture is so like the Von Neumann architecture that it might better be called the 'modified Von Neumann architecture' or the 'parallel Von Neumann architecture.'
The Von Neumann architecture consists of a memory, processor, clock, data bus, address bus, and control bus.
The memory consists of latches, an address decoder, control logic (control circuitry), an address bus, and a data bus.
The processor consists of registers (latches), an address bus, a data bus, a logic unit (usually called an ALU ('Arithmetic Logic Unit' if it can do arithmetic) and control logic (circuity).
The clock is a circuit that repeatedly generates a pattern of 1's and 0's on various lines (wires). The address bus is a group of wires that connect to each latch in memory and select the latch to be accessed.
The data bus is a group of wires that connect to each of the memory's latch's bits (loops in the book) and to registers in the processor.
The control bus is a group of wires that go from the clock to the processor and memory to signal each as to what to do at each time.
A diagram of the Von Neumann architecture is shown on the right.
.