The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on a 1945 description by John von Neumann, and by others, in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.
The term “von Neumann architecture” has evolved to refer to any stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time (since they share a common bus).
On a large scale, the ability to treat instructions as data is what makes assemblers, compilers, linkers, loaders, and other automated programming tools possible. It makes “programs that write programs” possible.
