It is well known that Charles Babbage's analytical machine had an architecture strongly ressembling the modern Von Neumann architecture.Also, it's notable that the tables for representing a program for Babbage's analytical machine ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/figures/menat3.png ) and von Neumann's work (such as http://library.ias.edu/files/pdfs/ecp/planningcodingof0103inst.pdf ) are quite analogous.Now I'm wondering if there's any indication to what extent von Neumann knew of the work done by Babbage, and if he used it as an inspiration for his own work.
The Relation between Babbage and von Neumann
ho.history overview
It seems likely that Von Neumann knew about Babbage since Aiken did and was pretty open about it as far back as 1937.  See this.  Also, Flowers, of Colossus fame did as well.  Von Nuemann's famous paper appeared in 1945 (see here and here), and does mention Aiken's work.But I can't find any direct evidence.  Good question, and a bit of fun to briefly research it.