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




8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198565932.003.0009

Robert Doran
Abstract: This chapter examines the architecture of the ACE computers in the light of developments in computer architecture over the fifty years that followed the birth of ACE. The concept of computer architecture is discussed and the history of the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) movement is reviewed. It is argued that a closer inspection of the Pilot ACE and the earlier proposals for the ACE suggests that the ACE's claim to be the first RISC architecture has merit.

Keywords: ACE, Alan M. Turing, computers, Reduced Instruction Set Computer,

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Contents
 
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Full Book Contents
Introduction
Part I The National Physical Laboratory and the ACE Project
1 The National Physical Laboratory
2 The creation of the NPL Mathematics Division
3 The origins and development of the ACE project
4 The Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory
Part II Turing and the History of Computing
5 Turing and the computer
6 The ACE and the shaping of British computing
7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’
8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers
Part III The ACE Computers
9 The Pilot ACE instruction format
10 Programming the Pilot ACE
11 The Pilot ACE: from concept to reality
12 Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE
13 The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15
14 The DEUCE—a user's view
15 The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model
16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
Part IV Electronics
17 How valves work
18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
Part V Technical Reports and Lectures on the ACE 1945–47
20 Proposed electronic calculator (1945)
21 Notes on memory (1945)
22 The Turing–Wilkinson lecture series (1946–7)
23 The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947)
Index
 
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