Progress report on digital computers

The author examines the evolution of digital computers and the question of whether modern computers are any different in principle and basic architecture from the computers of several decades ago. He describes the basic Von Neumann style, serial computer architecture. He discusses two ways to speed up the performance: overlapping of instruction fetch, decode, and execution, called the principle of pipelining; and partitioning programs into small jobs and executing each job in a separate unit, called parallel processing. A new breed of computing systems that has started to emerge is described. Commonly called artificial neural systems (ANS), they are modeled after biological neural networks.<>