At each machine step, the symbol on the tape may be changed and the tape moved a finite distance either forward or backward. Turing discovered that he could configure these simple machines to perform very complex calculations and posited his thesis that any problem that can be solved algorithmically can be solved by a Turing machine. An even more remarkable finding was that a single fixed machine, the Universal Turing Machine, was capable of carrying out the functions of any Turing machine. This discovery, that there exists a minimal level of computational ability that is sufficient for any algorithmic computation, set the stage for von Neumann s machine design. In von Neumann s machine architecture, treating instructions as data moves the complexity into the processor which maintains responsibility for marshalling, transporting, interpreting, and executing the bit flow across the processor-memory divide.
Instructional bits are just as binary as the bits of raw data.
Von Neumann handles the distinction by using registers, small memory storage areas that capture the state of computation, and specialized instruction registers that trigger the thousands of microcircuits that opens and closes gates like mindless doormen. The success of technology is the success of the von Neumann machine, keeping true to the algorithm, tirelessly maintaining the code-data distinction. The phenomenological shift from mechanics to abstraction that resulted from von Neumann s computing engine can be viewed in the light of comparable modernist disruptions of order occurring in art, physics, and literature. These comparisons draw on Vargish and Mook s extraction of common values from the physics of Einstein, the cubist revolution in art, and changes in literary form as seen in the works of Proust, Joyce and Kafka, during the historical modernist period from the turn of the century to end of the second world war. In Inside Modernism, Relativity Theory, Cubism and Narrative, Vargish and Mook, identify common attributes of modernism that include epistemic trauma, the move from norm to context, field theoretic frameworks, and self-referential reflexivity.