The design of conventional computers, based on stored programs and serial processing.

Any computer that does not employ concurrency or parallelism. Named after John Von Neumann (1903-1957), who is credited with the invention of the basic architecture of current sequential computers.

The `classic' design for computer hardware, named afer the mathematician John von Neumann, who formulated the main elements of the standard, sequential, stored program, computer architecture in the late 1940s. Non-von Neumann architectures are now being developed that exploit various forms of parallel or distributed processing. See also central processor, computation, connectionist model, parallel distributed processing.