- Title Pages
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Photographs
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 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<sup>1</sup>
- 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
- 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 <i>The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model</i>
- 16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
- 17 How valves work
- 18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
- 19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
- 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
Introduction
Introduction
- Chapter:
- (p.1) Introduction
- Source:
- Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
- Author(s):
B. Jack Copeland (Contributor Webpage)
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This introductory chapter discusses the development of Alan Turing's ‘universal computing machine’, better known as the universal Turing Machine. The earliest large-scale electronic digital computers, the British Colossus (1943) and American ENIAC (1945), did not store programmes in memory. In 1936, Turing came up with an idea for a machine with limitless memory, in which both data and instructions were to be stored. By 1945, groups in Britain and the US began developing hardware for a universal Turing machine. Turing headed a group at the National Physical Laboratory in London that designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-programme digital computer.
Keywords: universal computing machine, universal Turing Machine, computers, hardware, Automatic Computing Engine
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- Title Pages
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Photographs
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 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<sup>1</sup>
- 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
- 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 <i>The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model</i>
- 16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
- 17 How valves work
- 18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
- 19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
- 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
