The EDVAC was a binary serial computer with automatic addition, subtraction, multiplication, programmed division and automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial memory capacity of 1, 000 44-bit words ( later set to 1, 024 words, thus giving a memory, in modern terms, of 5. 5 kilobytes ).

The so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory.

EDVAC ( Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer ) was one of the earliest electronic computers.

John William Mauchly ( August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980 ) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.

Many early electronic computers were based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC report published in 1945.

During his tenure the Moore School built the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and began construction on its successor machine, the EDVAC.

The BRLESC I ( Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer ) was a first-generation electronic computer built by the United States Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory ( BRL ) at Aberdeen Proving Ground with assistance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ), and was designed to take over the computational workload of EDVAC and ORDVAC, which themselves were successors of ENIAC.

EDVAC, one of the first stored program computers

Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the physical wiring of the computer.

John von Neumann, who was consulting for the Moore School on the EDVAC sat in on the Moore School meetings at which the stored program concept was elaborated.

* June 30-Distribution of John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, containing the first published description of the logical design of a computer with stored-program and instruction data stored in the same address space within the memory ( von Neumann architecture ).

He mentions the EDVAC, the ENIAC's successor, and its innovation of stored programming, for which he credits John von Neumann.

* Preliminary design work on the ENIAC's successor machine the EDVAC resulted in the stored program concept used in all computers today, the logical design having been promulgated in John von Neumann's First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, a set of notes synthesized from meetings he attended at the Moore School.

With von Neumann's design, the program, or software, that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory.

It was not a Turing complete computer, which distinguishes it from more general machines, like contemporary Konrad Zuse's Z3 ( 1941 ), or later machines like the 1946 ENIAC, 1949 EDVAC, the University of Manchester designs, or Alan Turing's post-War designs at NPL and elsewhere.

While von Neumann is most often credited with the design of the stored-program computer because of his design of EDVAC, others before him, such as Konrad Zuse, had suggested and implemented similar ideas.

The third stream of computer development was Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC and EDVAC, which was widely publicized.

Their work, as exposed in the widely read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC ( 1945 ) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures ( 1946 ), influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world.

Eckert and Mauchly were already aware of the limitations of the machine and began plans on a second computer, to be called EDVAC.

Eckert and Mauchly, though they had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania, chose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company.

Mauchly persuaded the United States Census Bureau to order an " EDVAC II " computer — a model that was soon renamed UNIVAC — receiving a contract in 1948 that called for having the machine ready for the 1950 census.

He was also involved with the EDVAC and SEAC computer projects.

However, new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation, which caused a lengthy delay in the EDVAC design efforts.

EDVAC received a number of upgrades including punch-card I / O in 1953, extra memory in slower magnetic drum form in 1954, and a floating point arithmetic unit in 1958.

The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England.

Eckert, a co-inventor of ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for the ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

The EDVAC as installed in Building 328 at the Ballistics Research Laboratory.

Like the ENIAC, the EDVAC was built for the U. S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

The final cost of EDVAC, however, was similar to the ENIAC's, at just under $ 500, 000.

Wilkes obtained a copy of John von Neumann's prepress description of the EDVAC, a successor to the ENIAC under construction by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

At about the same time, EDVAC was under development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory was working on EDSAC.

On June 25, 1946, Goldstine forwarded 24 copies of the document to those intimately involved in the EDVAC project ; dozens or perhaps hundreds of mimeographs of the report were forwarded to von Neumann's colleagues at universities in the U. S. and in England in the weeks that followed.

First, publication amounted to a public disclosure that prevented the EDVAC from being patented ; second, some on the EDVAC design team contended that the stored-program concept had evolved out of meetings at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering predating von Neumann's activity as a consultant there, and that much of the work represented in the First Draft was no more than a translation of the discussed concepts into the language of formal logic in which von Neumann was fluent, hence, failure of von Neumann and Goldstine to list others as authors on the First Draft led credit to be attributed to von Neumann alone.

Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for the ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

The architecture for the first two UIUC computers was taken from a technical report from a committee at the Institute for Advanced Study ( IAS ) at Princeton, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, edited by John von Neumann ( but with ideas from Eckert & Mauchley and many others.

By the spring of 1946, Eckert and Mauchly had procured a U. S. Army contract for the University of Pennsylvania and were already designing the EDVAC — the successor machine to the ENIAC — at the university's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

EDVAC was delivered to the Ballistics Research Laboratory in August 1949.

On June 30, 1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.

EDVAC was designed to perform a certain number of instructions ( or operations ) of various types.

These instructions could be combined to create useful programs for the EDVAC to run.

Tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the ( slower, but earlier ) Harvard Mark I failed very rarely.

Eckert and Mauchly started work on a new design, to be later called the EDVAC, which would be both simpler and more powerful.

Von Neumann wrote up an incomplete set of notes ( First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC ) which were intended to be used as an internal memorandum describing, elaborating, and couching in formal logical language the ideas developed in the meetings.

Warren served as supervisor of the EDVAC project ; central to his discussion are J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and their disagreements with administrators over patent rights ; discusses John von Neumann's 1945 draft report on the EDVAC, and its lack of proper acknowledgment of all the EDVAC contributors.

ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed the EDVAC's construction in August 1944, and design work for the EDVAC commenced before the ENIAC was fully operational.