John von Neumann laid out the architecture for modern electronic computer hardware in 1945.6 Von Neumann knew McCulloch well, and read McCulloch and Pitts’s paper; he then used the ideas of encoding 0s and 1s in elements of a circuit, and of how to combine these elements to do logic, in his architecture for a computer. Indeed, throughout his report laying out the EDVAC computer’s architecture, von Neumann talks of his computer as being modeled on how the brain works. Computer hardware has some foundations in brain science, not the other way around.
