EDVAC Acronym for Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer. An early stored-program electronic digital computer, originally commissioned from the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School by the US Army in 1944 while the ENIAC was still under construction, but not operational until 1952. In 1945 John von Neumann prepared a proposal for the EDVAC that described the logical design of a computer with a “stored program”, where the instructions to the machine would be stored in substantially the same fashion as the data. Although there is some disagreement as to whether von Neumann or the team of Mauchly and Eckert originated the stored-program concept, this was its first written documentation. Regardless of its origin, the stored-program model that formed the basis of the EDVAC design motivated all subsequent machine designs.

EDVAC (ˈɛdvæk) Computing Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer