Shared-program technique

The first concept became known as "shared-program technique" (7). This technique states that the actual computer hardware should be simple and not need to be hand-wired for each program. Instead, complex instructions should be used to control the simple hardware, allowing it to be reprogrammed much faster.(8)
The second concept was also extremely important to the development of programming languages. Von Neumann called it "conditional control transfer"(7). This idea gave rise to the notion of subroutines, or small blocks of code that could be jumped to in any order, instead of a single set of chronologically ordered steps for the computer to take.