Lavington S., Burton C., Campbell-Kelly M., Johnson R., Lavington S. Alan Turing and His Contemporaries. Building the World's First Computers

Swindon: The Chartered Institute for IT, 2012. — 128 p. — ISBN: 978-1-90612-490-8, 978-1-78017-105-0.Secret wartime projects in code-breaking, radar and ballistics produced a wealth of ideas and technologies that kick-started the development of digital computers. Alan Turing took an early lead on the theory side, along with fellow mathematicians on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the story of the people and projects that flourished in the post-war period. By 1955 the computers produced by companies such as Ferranti, English Electric, Elliott Brothers and the British Tabulating Machine Co. had begun to appear in the market-place. The Information Age was dawning. Before the market passed to the Americans, for a brief period Alan Turing and his contemporaries held centre stage. Their influence is still discernible deep down within today's hardware and software.Authors
AcknowledgementsThe ideas men
Science at war
The Moore School: the cradle of electronic computing
The Universal Turing Machine
Practical problems, 1945–7
The rich tapestry of projects, 1948–54
Aces and deuces
Turing’s first computer design
Toil and trouble
Intelligence and artificial intelligence
Pilot ACE arrives at last
DEUCE and others
Ivory Towers and Tea Rooms
Maurice Wilkes and the Cambridge University
Mathematical Laboratory
Post-war reconstruction and the stored-program computer
A Memory for EDSAC
EDSAC, ACE and LEO
Not just EDSAC
First steps in programming
Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill
The last days of the EDSAC
The Manchester machines
Memories are made of this …
The Baby computer
The Baby grows up
Ferranti enters the picture
A supercomputer
Programs and users
What came next?
Meanwhile, in deepest Hertfordshire
The Admiralty’s secret
Innovations at Borehamwood
Swords into ploughshares
The coming of automation
One man in a Barn
X-ray calculations
The challenge of memory
Computers for all!
The Booth multiplier
Commercial success
Into the marketplace
Out of the laboratory
Defence and the Cold War
Science and engineering
The world of commerce and business
The market grows and the manufacturers shrink
Hindsight and foresight: the legacy of Turing and his contemporaries
Who did what, and when?
Turing as seen by his contemporaries
Turing’s reputation by 1984
Appendixes
Technical comparison of five early British computers
The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental
Machine (SSEM), known as the ‘Baby’
The Cambridge EDSAC
The Ferranti Mark I’s instruction format
Instruction format for the English Electric DEUCE
Turing and computing: a Timeline
Alan Turing at NPL, 1945–8
Alan Turing at Manchester, 1948–54
Further reading
General accounts of the period 1945–60
Chapter-specific books