The advent of the stored-program computer

The first implementation of a stored-program computer, a device that can hold programs in memory, was the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), developed at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1948 [Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine]. This introduced the concept of RAM, Random Access Memory (or more generally, memory) in computers today. Prior to the SSEM, computers had fixed-storage; namely, all functions had to be prewired into the system. The ability to store data dynamically in a temporary storage device such as RAM meant that machines were no longer bound by the capacity of the storage device, but could hold an arbitrary volume of information.