In modern usage, the von Neumann machine is unfortunately poorly defined. You won't find it defined in Hennessy and Patterson (although they won the von Neumann award); it's discussed but not defined even in appendix L.<p>There are strong similarities between the Princeton IAS, UNIVAC 1, IBM 701 and even the CDC 1604 (Cray's transistor version). In fact, I'd say that the von Neumann reports [0] are the first 'architecture' with apologies to IBM. Sort of kind of. Don't chop my head off. But that similarity is <i>not</i> what people are thinking when they say von Neumann machine. It should be but it isn't.<p>But you have to really read the writing to get a sense of what a von Neumann machine actually is and reading those reports are damn hard. <i>The Computer As Von Neumann Planned It</i> [1] is fairly readable.<p>As an example, the von Neumann machine word had a binary digit (bit) describing whether a minor cycle (word) was a standard number (data) or an order (instruction, really two instructions); section 15.1 of the EDVAC report if you want to look it up. So it's kind've tagged. Lot other weirdnesses and cool ideas.<p><pre><code> Minor cycles fall into two classes: Standard numbers
and orders. These two categories should be distinguished
from each other by their respective first units i.e. by
the value of i0. We agree accordingly that i0 = 0 is to
designate a standard number, and i0 = 1 an order.
</code></pre>
Anyways, these days whenever someone says von Neumann they generally gloss over this blizzard of detail which they probably were never taught and just mean scalar. It's doubtful whether they are even distinguishing Harvard and Princeton architectures. They just mean something basic, fundamental, abstract. But they don't really mean von Neumann.<p>This all was the basis of patent lawsuit mentioned in the article. Over the years, there have been many histories written. <i>Reconsidering the Stored-Program Concept</i> [2] is pretty good.<p>[0] <a href="https://library.ias.edu/ecp" rel="nofollow">https://library.ias.edu/ecp</a><p>[1] <a href="http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/godfrey-computer-as-von-neumann-planned-it.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/godfrey-compute...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/ReconsideringTheStoredProgramConcept.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.markpriestley.net/pdfs/ReconsideringTheStoredProg...</a>