Oxford Scholarship Online: Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine

Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to build the Modern Computer Copeland, B. Jack Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand Print publication date: 2005 (this edition) Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-856593-2
16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198565932.003.0017 Benjamin Wells Abstract: This chapter describes software emulators for the Pilot ACE. The first known software emulator of the Pilot ACE was built in Visual BASIC by Donald Davies in the early 1990s. In spring 2001, two graduate students at the University of San Francisco, Athena Huang Shih-Yun and Nicola Rugai, ported Davies's code to Java as part of their Master's Project. Huang wrote additional Java code and improved and extended the interface. The improved emulator was written for The Turing Archive for the History of Computing and was inspired by the desire to offer a Pilot ACE emulation in a platform-independent format. Huang subsequently adapted the Pilot ACE emulator to the architecture of the Big ACE. Keywords: Visual BASIC, Java, Donald Davies, Athena Huang Shih-Yun, Nicola Rugai, software emulator, Pilot ACE, Big ACE,