If your mechanical calculator is too wide and your room is small, replace it with an electronic general-purpose one.

The Babbage‘s “Analytical engine” project wasn’t encouraged too much by the British government. The public funds for this experiment weren’t awarded. The Babbage’s idea was very revolutionary, but it was difficult to use it in the real world. The ordinary people couldn’t approach to this machine both because of the size-cost and because of the not easy interaction with the engine. John Von Neumann, a chemical engineer and mathematician, helped the science to discover a new generation of programmable hardware architecture based on electronics devices: the general-purpose architecture.

John Von Neumann

The general-purpose architecture is set up by three parts: CPU (central processor unit),memory (RAM, ROM), Input /Output devices (Disks, printers, scanners, USB). They are connected each other by a system bus.

General-purpose architecture

The CPU and the memory are programmable by a low-level programming language: it’s the assembly (it’s depend on the hardware architecture). This was the first step from the mechanic calculators to the modern elaboration systems.Today the most of the programmable logic devices (home computer, netbook, notebook, electronics board) are compliant to the Von Neumann architecture.