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The Pilot ACE was later augmented with a magnetic drum which put its total storage capacity
on a par with the Manchester computer, and enabled it to tackle very large matrix problems.
ACE’s legacy
It happened that George Nelson, the managing director of English Electric, was an external
member of the NPL Executive Committee from 1946 to 1948. Learning of the ACE project, he
saw its potential both for his firm’s engineering calculations and as a possible product. A young
graduate, George Davis, was appointed as a liaison to transfer the technology between the NPL
and English Electric’s Nelson Research Laboratory in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire. There was a
good working relationship between the two organizations.
In 1952, when the Pilot ACE turned out to be such a success, Nelson decided that English
Electric would build a copy; the English Electric machine was, unsurprisingly, called DEUCE,
a contrived acronym for ‘digital electronic universal computing engine’. By this time the com-
puter industry in the UK was beginning to blossom, with about a dozen firms eventually manu-
facturing computers. The first in the market was Ferranti, followed over the next few years by
several of the electronics and control firms, including EMI, AEI, Metropolitan Vickers, General
Electric, and Elliott Brothers. In 1955 the Lyons Company formed a subsidiary, Leo Computers
Limited, and by the late 1950s the office machine companies BTM and Powers-Samas had
begun computer developments. Thus, despite its early commitment, English Electric soon
found itself in a crowded marketplace.
DEUCE had a similar specification to the Pilot ACE, with thirty-two delay lines and a drum
store, and it sold for about £60,000. It was a scientific machine unsuitable for commercial data
processing, but it sold well to organizations with big computational requirements. Indeed, in
terms of raw computational speed it was the best value machine on the market.
DEUCE was particularly popular with aircraft companies. A major driver for aircraft firms to
acquire computers was the fall-out from the Comet disasters of 1954. The de Havilland Comet
was Britain’s (and the world’s) first passenger jet airliner, and during 1954 many lives were lost
following crashes that were found to be caused by metal fatigue resulting from an instability
at speed (so-called ‘flutter’). The government mandated that extensive stress calculations must
be undertaken for all new aircraft to prove their airworthiness. It was a case of an ill wind, and
English Electric was a primary beneficiary.
Although DEUCE, like the Pilot ACE, was fundamentally difficult to program, in 1955 a
user-friendly interpretive matrix package known as GIP (for ‘general interpretive program’)
was developed for the Pilot ACE by Brian Munday. This was adapted for DEUCE and greatly
simplified the development of the matrix programs needed for stress calculations.
Over the next five years DEUCEs were sold to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) and
to the aerospace manufacturers Short Brothers & Harland, Bristol Aeroplane, Bristol Siddeley
Aero-engines, and English Electric Aviation (subsequently the British Aircraft Corporation).
The RAE eventually acquired a second machine, and the two were happily known as Gert and
Daisy, in homage to two popular comediennes of the time.
Between its launch in 1955 and its final sales five years later, over thirty DEUCEs were sold. As
well as the aerospace industry, several went to defence and research organizations with intensive
computational needs, including the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, the Atomic Energy
Authority, the National Engineering Laboratory, and the Central Electricity Generating Board.