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 978-1906124908, 1906124906.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.
Acknowledgements.The 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.