programmers handbook manchester electronic computer de turing alan mathison (1 résultats)

First edition. ALAN TURING'S HANDBOOK FOR THE FERRANTI MARK I THE WORLD'S FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMING MANUAL. First edition, extremely rare, of "the world's first computer programming manual" (Jack Copeland & Jason Long, 'Alan Turing: How his Universal Machine became a Musical Instrument,' IEEE Spectrum, 2017), written by Turing for the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercially available electronic digital computer. "In May 1948 Turing resigned from the [National Physical Laboratory]. Work on the ACE [Automatic Computing Engine] had drawn almost to a standstill. [M. H. A.] Newman lured a 'very fed up' Turing to Manchester, where in May 1948 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory (there being no Director). Turing designed the input mechanism and programming system of, and wrote a programming manual for, the full-scale Manchester computer" (Copeland (ed.), p. 121). The Handbookinstructs users on the programming of the Ferranti Mark I, which was completed in February 1951 and which Turing referred to as the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II. (The first US commercial machine, the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC, appeared a few months later.) The Handbook was written "presumably mostly in the half year gap between the dismantling of the Manchester Mark 1 and the delivery of the Ferranti Mark 1 in February 1951" (University of Manchester, Mark I Documents, online, 2005). Written "mainly for the benefit of those who will actually do programming for the Mark II machine", Turing notes in this introduction that "Electronic computers are intended to carry out any definite rule of thumb process which could have been done by a human operator working in a disciplined but unintelligent manner. The electronic computer should however obtain its results very much more quickly". From 6-15 July 1951 Manchester University hosted an international conference, attended by some 170 delegates, celebrating the installation of the Ferranti Mark 1, at which time the Handbook was probably distributed. The present document is the first of at least three editions of the Handbook, and was apparently written before the machine was fully installed and operating (the library input routines, for instance, are described in the future tense). Turing made little contribution to the later editions because by 1951 his interests had turned back to morphogenesis (in connection with which he used the Mark I for the solution of partial differential equations). This complimentary copy of the first edition is stamped "with the compliments / of A. M. Turing" (the former printed, the latter handwritten in ink, not in Turing's hand). It is accompanied by 9 mimeographed items relating to the Handbook, including a letter from Turing stating the Computing Machine Laboratory at the University of Manchester is willing to "send copies of our library sub-routines to holders of handbooks", and four such subroutines: 'Input. Purpose. To Read from Tape' (1 July 1951); 'English. Purpose. To Print Any Fixed Material with Page Printing' (1 July 1951); 'Roughwrite. Purpose. To Write from Rough Tapes' (1 July 1951); 'Reciproot. Purpose. To Calculate Square Roots and Reciprocal Square Roots' (9 July 1951). The extraordinary rarity of the Handbook might be explained by the fact that only two units of the Ferranti Mark I were actually built. It has been suggested that only "several tens of these manuals were printed" (in all editions) (Lavington). Not on OCLC or Library Hub. RBH lists only one other copy (without the Turing letter and added subroutines). Provenance: Donald Bayley (1921-2020), electronic engineer and collaborator of Alan Turing on 'Delilah,' a functioning portable speech-encryption system, at the MI6 base at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, in 1944. Andrew Hodges writes that Turing spoke to Bayley in 1944 of "building a brain" (uk/publications/); thence by descent to the previous owner. "It was in the Manchester lab, in June 1948, that the first electronic all-purpose, stored-program computer ran its first program. Nicknamed 'Baby,' this prototype was rough and ready. Programs were entered into memory, bit by bit, via a panel of hand-operated switches. Bright dots and dashes on a tiny glass screen formed the output. Baby was created by two brilliant engineers Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn as a test bed for their new ground-breaking, high-speed electronic memory, the Williams-Kilburn tube (a type of cathode-ray tube). Although Baby ran its first program a few weeks before Turing arrived at the Manchester lab, Turing's ideas had heavily influenced Kilburn as he designed the computer. (Kilburn didn't like giving Turing credit, but the historical evidence on this point is clear.) "After his arrival, Turing improved on the bare-bones nature of Baby, designing an input-output system that was based on the wartime technology used at Bletchley Park. Williams and Kilburn themselves knew nothing of Bletchley Park and its nine gigantic Colossus computers. These secret machines were the world's first large-scale electronic computers, although they were not all-purpose and did not incorporate the concept of the stored program. Instead, each Colossus was controlled by switches and a patch panel. The war ended before a plan to use a program punched into a teleprinter tape to control the computer could be tested. "Turing used the same punched tape as the basis of his input-output punch and reader. As with Colossus, a row of light-sensitive cells converted the tape's patterns of holes into electrical pulses and fed these pulses to the computer. What made Baby unique was that rather than running the program directly from a tape, it stored the program in memory for execution. (Once programs are stored in internal memory, a computer can edit them before or even while they run.) "Soon, a larger computer took shape in the laboratory. Turing called it the Mark I. Kilburn and Williams worked primarily on the hardware and Turing on the software. Wi.