Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, Part I, Volume I. Second edition, 1947

'First officially published conceptual account of the stored-program computer; (Origins of Cyberspace, 959) 'A few months after ENIAC had its first public demonstration (in February 1946), the three chief members of the IAS Electronic Computer Project issued their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, a report to the Army Ordnance Department that represents the first published formal conceptual paper on the stored-program computer, if we call von Neumann's informal First Draft (OOC 954) a privately circulated working paper.

The first edition of the Preliminary Discussion report appeared in June 1946; a revised second edition, containing an expanded account of the arithmetic processes and a report of further experimental work, was issued in September 1947.' (from Origins of Cyberspace) 'The Preliminary Report contains the first technical description of what is known as the Von Neumann architecture, in which programs and data are stored in a comparatively slow-to-access storage medium, such as a hard disk; and work is performed on them in a fast, volatile random-access memory... The von Neumann architecture, with some additions and refinements, remained the logical basis for the design of most computers built since the Report's publication..'

One of the seminal papers in the history of computing.