Von Neumann set out to build a Universal Turing Machine that would operate at electronic speeds. At its core was a 32-by-32-by-40-bit matrix of high-speed random-access memory—the nucleus of all things digital ever since. “Random access” meant that all individual memory locations—collectively constituting the machine’s internal “state of mind”—were equally accessible at any time. “High speed” meant that the memory was accessible at the speed of light, not the speed of sound. It was the removal of this constraint that unleashed the powers of Turing’s otherwise impractical Universal Machine.
