IAS machine
first electronic computer to be built at the Institute for Advanced Study
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University and IAS. The computer was built under his direction, starting in 1946 and finished in 1951.
The general organization is called von Neumann architecture, even though it was both conceived and implemented by others. The computer is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History but is not currently on display.
History
In 1944 summer, John von Neumann met Herman Goldstine, a computer architect and a principal investigator of the ENIAC machine. In this meeting, Goldstine presented the ENIAC project to von Neumann. As the result of this meeting, von Neumann wrote a memo called First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC as the proposed IAS computer project. Goldstine typed the report and made a distribution on June 25, 1945. Von Neumann invited Goldstine to join the IAS project in early 1946, as the assistant director and later the director of the project. Arthur Burks, a senior engineer of the ENIAC project came with Goldstine to work in the IAS project.
“IAS machine” enters the record as first electronic computer to be built at the Institute for Advanced Study. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what machine, first and electronic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2535967. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1951, 1944 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “IAS machine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.