CONCEPT
Stored-Program Architecture
The 1945 architectural commitment — instructions and data share the same memory, the instruction is the data — that embodies the picture theory of meaning in hardware.
Alan Turing's 1936 theoretical machine and John von Neumann's 1945 engineering specification established the architectural principle that defines essentially all modern computers: instructions and data occupy the same memory and are treated identically by the machine. The program can operate on itself. The instruction is the data. This is not merely a useful engineering choice. Read through Wittgenstein's framework, it is a philosophical commitment — the commitment that meaning is exhausted by formal structure — realized at the hardware level. Every computer ever built, from ENIAC to the laptop on which these words were composed, embodies it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The architecture's elegance consists in its resolution of the representation problem. There is no gap between what the machine does and what its instructions mean, because the instructions mean nothing beyond what the machine does. The stored program is the picture theory in silicon: structure and meaning are identical, and understanding the program consists in tracing its operations.
The commitment was productive