This article is fascinating. I had no idea that the Von Neumann machine was an extrapolation of a mental model. Even more fascinating, that the existince of a symbolic computation machine made the possibility of purely symobolic epistimology impossible. It's like they abstracted a lever higher than they wanted to and then made a cleaner, simpler implementation of it. And now with modern AI we are doubling down on that implementation and trying to build a new kind of intelligence no top of it.