  After 1942, Turing learnt that electronic components offered the speed, storage capacity and logical functions required to be effective as ‘tapes’ and instruction tables. So from 1945, Turing tried to use electronics to turn his universal machine into practical reality. Turing rapidly composed a detailed plan for a modern stored-program computer: that is, a computer in which data and instructions are stored and manipulated alike. Turing's ideas led the field, although his report of 1946 postdated von Neumann's more famous EDVAC report (von Neumann 1945). It can however be argued, as does Davis (2000), that von Neumann gained his fundamental insight into the computer through his pre-war familiarity with Turing's logical work. At the time, however, these basic principles were not much discussed. The difficulty of engineering the electronic hardware dominated everything.