First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC
The report described a machine in which the program is held in the same memory as the data.
Why it matters
A stored program made the machine usable for any algorithm, the precondition without which later AI programs could not exist.
The document describes the logical structure of the machine abstractly, without tying it to particular valves. The text is von Neumann's, though the design work was collective and authorship remained disputed. In this atlas the record marks a precondition, not an AI event.