CHAPTER 6 TURING’S GREAT INVENTION: THE UNIVERSAl COmPUTING
mACHINE (COPElAND)
- Turing (1936). The publication date of ‘On computable numbers’ is sometimes cited incorrectly as
1937; for details, see The Essential Turing, pp. 5–6. - See The Essential Turing, pp. 15–16.
- See B. J. Copeland and G. Sommaruga, ‘The stored-program universal computer: did Zuse antici-
pate Turing and von Neumann?’ in G. Sommaruga and T. Strahm, Turing’s Revolution, Birkhauser/
Springer (2015). This article offers a detailed analysis of the stored-program concept. - For more details see Copeland et al. (2006).
- T. H. Flowers in interview with Copeland, July 1996.
- See my chapters ‘Mr Newman’s section’ and ‘Colossus and the rise of the modern computer’ in
Copeland et al. (2006). - See my ‘The origins and development of the ACE project’, in Copeland et al. (2005).
- These news articles are reprinted in Copeland et al. (2005), pp. 6–9.
- T. H. Flowers in interview with Copeland, July 1998.
- Minutes of the Executive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory, 20 April 1948, NPL library;
a digital facsimile is in The Turing Archive for the History of Computing, http://www.AlanTuring.net/
npl_minutes_apr1948. - ‘The origins and development of the ACE project’ (Note 7), pp. 57–9.
- T. Vickers, ‘Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE’, and also pp. 72–4 (Note 7), in Copeland
et al. (2005). - Turing (Copeland 2012), Chapter 9.
- Letter from F. C. Williams to Brian Randell, 1972 (published in B. Randell, ‘On Alan Turing and the
origins of digital computers’, in B. Meltzer and D. Michie (eds), Machine Intelligence 7 , Edinburgh
University Press (1972)). - Letter from Williams to Randell, 1972 (Note 14); F. C. Williams in interview with Christopher Evans
in 1976, ‘The pioneers of computing: an oral history of computing’, Science Museum, London, copy-
right Board of Trustees of the Science Museum. This interview was supplied to me on audiotape in
1995 by the archives of the London Science Museum and transcribed by me in 1997. - A. M. Turing, Programmers’ Handbook for Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II, Computing
Machine Laboratory, University of Manchester (no date, c.1950); a digital facsimile is in The Turing
Archive for the History of Computing (http://www.AlanTuring.net/Programmers_handbook). - Great British Innovation Vote (http://www.topbritishinnovations.org/Pastinnovations.aspx).
- For additional information on Turing’s thesis see The Essential Turing, pp. 40–5 and 577–8.
- M. H. A. Newman, ‘Alan Mathison Turing, 1912–1954’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal
Society, 1 (November 1955), 253–263, p. 256. - For details, see H. R. Lewis and C. H. Papadimitriou, Elements of the Theory of Computation, Prentice-
Hall (1981), pp. 170–1. - For a discussion of what I call Turing-machine realism, see B. J. Copeland and O. Shagrir, ‘Do accel-
erating Turing machines compute the uncomputable?’, Minds and Machines, 21 (special issue on the
philosophy of computer science) (2011), 221–39. - Draft précis of ‘On computable numbers’ (undated, 2 pp.), King’s College Archive, catalogue reference
K4 (in French, translation by B. J. Copeland). - M. Y. Vardi, ‘Who begat computing?’, Communications of the ACM, 56 (January 2013), 5.
- Letter from John von Neumann to Norbert Wiener (29 November 1946), Von Neumann Archive,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The text of von Neumann’s lecture ‘Rigorous theories of con-
trol and information’ is printed in J. von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (ed. A. W.
Burks), University of Illinois Press (1966); see p. 50. - Letter from Stanley Frankel to Brian Randell, 1972, published in Randell (Note 14). I am grateful to
Brian Randell for supplying me with a copy of this letter.
NOTES TO PAGES 50–55 | 487