Computer Architecture - History

History

An early example of an architectural definition of a computer was John Von Neumann's 1945 paper, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, which described an organization of logical elements. IBM used this to develop the IBM 701, the company's first commercial stored program computer, delivered in early 1952.

The term “architecture” in computer literature can be traced to the work of Lyle R. Johnson, Muhammad Usman Khan and Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., members in 1959 of the Machine Organization department in IBM’s main research center. Johnson had the opportunity to write a proprietary research communication about Stretch, an IBM-developed supercomputer for Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. In attempting to characterize his chosen level of detail for discussing the luxuriously embellished computer, he noted that his description of formats, instruction types, hardware parameters, and speed enhancements was at the level of “system architecture” – a term that seemed more useful than “machine organization.”

Subsequently, Brooks, one of the Stretch designers, started Chapter 2 of a book (Planning a Computer System: Project Stretch, ed. W. Buchholz, 1962) by writing, “Computer architecture, like other architecture, is the art of determining the needs of the user of a structure and then designing to meet those needs as effectively as possible within economic and technological constraints.”

Brooks went on to play a major role in the development of the IBM System/360 (now called the IBM zSeries) line of computers, where “architecture” gained currency as a noun with the definition as “what the user needs to know”. Later the computer world would employ the term in many less-explicit ways.