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electronic digital means as against those possible with comparable
analogue electromechanical technology. Furthermore Mauchly's
insistence that it should be a machine capable of more general tasks
than those needed for ballistics invoked the idea of the computer
as a universal machine, which, despite being implicit in Turing's
influential pre-war paper, was not widely appreciated. The ENIAC
led to the EDVAC, the 'Electronic Discrete Variable Computer',
which was able to store data, and which also inspired a document
entitled 'First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'. In this paper the now
standard logical structure of modern computers was first articu-
lated, comprising of a memory unit, storing both data and instruc-
tions, an arithmetic unit, input and output units and a control unit.
It was the capacity to store data electronically that demonstrated
that such devices could be universal machines, which could be
programmed to perform different operations. This configuration
became known as the 'Von Neumann architecture', after John von
Neumann, whose name graced the report as its main author.
The simultaneous development of the Manchester Mk
and the
ENIAC marks the beginning of the digital age, in that they are
the first computers in the modern sense: digital, binary machines
capable of storing data and of being reconfigured to undertake
different tasks. The proximate cause of their emergence was the War
with its unprecedented demands for complex calculation at very
great speed. But, as this chapter has shown, they are also the embod-
iment of capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on abstraction,
exchangeability and self-regulation. Turing's conceptual machine,
capable of being reconfigured in an infinite number of different
states, is the perfect, idealized model of capitalism as a universal
machine, in which different phenomena, labour and commodities
are homogenized in order to be exchanged, manipulated and
distributed.
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