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Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
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Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to build the Modern Computer

B. Jack Copeland

Abstract

The mathematical genius Alan Turing (1912-1954) was one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th century. Now well known for his crucial wartime role in breaking the ENIGMA code, he was the first to conceive of the fundamental principle of the modern computer — the idea of controlling a computing machine's operations by means of coded instructions, stored in the machine's ‘memory’. In 1945, Turing drew up his revolutionary design for an electronic computing machine — his Automatic Computing Engine (‘ACE’). A pilot model of the ACE ran its first programme in 1950 and the production v ... More

Keywords: ENIGMA code, computer, computer code, computer memory, DEUCE, personal computer, hardware, software, artificial intelligence, artificial life

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2005 Print ISBN-13: 9780198565932
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198565932.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

B. Jack Copeland, editor
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Author Webpage

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Epigraph

Foreword

Acknowledgements

List of Photographs

Contributors

Introduction

B. Jack Copeland

Part I The National Physical Laboratory and the ACE Project

1 The National Physical Laboratory

Eileen Magnello

2 The creation of the NPL Mathematics Division

Mary Croarken

3 The origins and development of the ACE project

B. Jack Copeland

4 The Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory1

James H. Wilkinson

Part II Turing and the History of Computing

5 Turing and the computer

B. Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot

6 The ACE and the shaping of British computing

Martin Campbell-Kelly

7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’

Teresa Numerico

8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers

Robert Doran

Part III The ACE Computers

9 The Pilot ACE instruction format

Henry John Norton

10 Programming the Pilot ACE

J. G. Hayes

11 The Pilot ACE: from concept to reality

Robin A. Vowels

12 Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE

Tom Vickers

13 The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15

Harry D. Huskey

14 The DEUCE—a user's view

Robin A. Vowels

15 The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model

Michael Woodger

16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web

Benjamin Wells

Part IV Electronics

17 How valves work

David O. Clayden

18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits

Maurice Wilkes

19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE

David O. Clayden

Part V Technical Reports and Lectures on the ACE 1945–47

20 Proposed electronic calculator (1945)

Alan M. Turing

21 Notes on memory (1945)

Alan M. Turing

22 The Turing–Wilkinson lecture series (1946–7)

Alan M. Turing and James H. Wilkinson

23 The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947)

Harry D. Huskey

End Matter

Index