What marks did Turing leave behind?
Fig. 1: The Pilot Ace. Alan Turing designed the Automatic computing engine (Ace)
at the National Physical Laboratory in London.
The trial machine was finished in 1950.
The Pilot Ace is one of the few surviving electronic digital computers from the early days.
Credit: Science Museum, London/Science & society picture library
Conclusions
The groundbreaking work on the (universal) Turing machine was published in 1936/37. From this theoretical model to Turing's design of the Ace vacuum tube computer (1945), several years had passed. The plugboard-controlled Colossus (1943) was not a stored program machine. It appears that Wilkes only became aware of the importance of future-oriented digital computers by way of a detour through the U.S.
The Ace reveals the direct influence of Turing. In Manchester, where he drafted the specifications for the input-output unit and wrote the programming manual, his hand is less apparent. The stored program machines constructed in Cambridge and Manchester reflect the von Neumann architecture. Turing probably had little influence on computer construction. Even with the British stored program machines, with the exception of the Ace, he contributed little or nothing at all. At least in the beginning, the builders of the first relay and vacuum tube computers (Aiken, Atanasoff, Eckert, Lebedev, Mauchly, Stibitz, and Zuse) were not aware of Turing's pioneering concepts. With the exception of Lebedev, their early machines were not stored program computers.
References
Bruderer, Herbert: Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin/Boston, 3. Auflage 2020, Band 1, 970 Seiten, 577 Abbildungen, 114 Tabellen, https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/567028?rskey=xoRERF&result=7
Bruderer, Herbert: Meilensteine der Rechentechnik, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin/Boston, 3. Auflage 2020, Band 2, 1055 Seiten, 138 Abbildungen, 37 Tabellen, https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/567221?rskey=A8Y4Gb&result=4
Bruderer, Herbert: Milestones in Analog and Digital Computing, Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Cham, 3rd edition 2020, 2 volumes, 2113 pages, 715 illustrations, 151 tables, translated from the German by John McMinn, https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783030409739
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Lavington, Simon: Swords and ploughshares: Connections between computer projects for war and peace, 1945–55, in: Cliff B. Jones; John L. Lloyd (eds.): Dependable and historic computing, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2011, pages 316–317.
Priestley, Mark: A science of operations, Springer-Verlag, London 2011, page 125
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Herbert Bruderer (herbert.bruderer@bluewin.ch; bruderer@retired.ethz.ch) is a retired lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and a historian of technology.
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