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doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxs015

A Synopsis of the Book Alan Turing

and his Contemporaries: Building
the Worlds First Computers
Simon Lavington1,2,
of Computer Science, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK
Cottage, 46 High Street, Sproughton, Suffolk IP8 3AH, UK
Corresponding author: lavis@essex.ac.uk

2 Lemon Tree

To mark the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the British Computer Society has published a
book written by members of the Computer Conservation Society. The book examines Alan Turings
contribution to the implementation of practical stored-program digital computers and the relation
between Turing and the other computer pioneers active in the period 194555. In this invited article,
the books Editor gives an overall view of the subject, focussing particularly on Alan Turings special
contributions in the first decade of the Information Age.
Keywords: Turing; computer history; pilot ACE; Bletchley Park; EDVAC; National Physical Laboratory
Received 1 February 2012; revised 1 February 2012
Handling editor: Erol Gelenbe

1.

INTRODUCTION

Alan Turing is a National Treasurearguably an International

Treasure. The many publications and events devoted to his
name in this, the centenary year of his birth, illustrate Alan
Turings undoubted reputation among todays mathematicians
and computer scientists. More generally, and to IT users
everywhere, Turing has been labelled by some commentators
as the inventor of the modern computer though, in the public
mind, his vital contributions as code-breaker at Bletchley Park
during World War II are perhaps of more significance.
Was it always thus? Sixty years ago, how would Alan Turing (Fig. 1) have been regarded by his contemporaries? What
exactly was his role in the immediate post-war years, when practical digital computers were but twinklings in the eyes of a very
few academics and when Bletchley Park and Colossus [1] were
still closely guarded secrets? At Bletchley Park Turing had been
perhaps the most brilliant of a group of very clever people, but
the conscripted teams at government research establishments
had largely dispersed by the time anyone began thinking of the
next step in automatic calculating machines. The field was open
for new players and new initiatives. By no means all of the new
players had read, or had understood the theoretical significance
of, Turings 1936 paper On Computable Numbers [2] where the
concept of a universal computing machine was first formalized.

The book Alan Turing and his contemporaries: building the

worlds first computers attempts to get into the minds of those
digital pioneers who were struggling to build universal storedprogram computers in the UK in the period 194555. It is about
people and places and the gradual advance of machines from
the laboratory to the market place. It is also about technology
and the rich tapestry of novel ideas that characterized early
attempts to produce useable machines. Some design concepts
soon proved less than cost-effective and fell out of fashion;
others found favour in the market place and are with us
today, deep inside the hardware and software of the modern
computer.

2.

IN THE BEGINNING: THE IDEAS MEN

The book [3] begins by describing how three significant

factors came together at the University of Pennsylvania
between 1943 and 1945: an urgent need for rapid arithmetical
calculations; novel high-frequency electronic techniques; lavish
US government funding. The result was ENIAC (Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer) [4]. Although certainly
not a universal stored-program computer, this huge machine
was a technological triumph that focussed the minds of people
such as the electrical engineer Presper Eckert, the physicist

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1 Department

780

S. Lavington

John Mauchley and the renowned Princeton mathematician

John von Neumann. The ENIAC team quickly produced ideas
for a successor computer, to be called EDVAC, the Electronic
Discrete Variable Automatic Computer. The team addressed
a challenge: how to make ENIACs successor more generalpurpose, so that its benefits could be more easily applied to
a much wider range of computational tasks. The ideas were
written up by John von Neumann in June 1945 in a 101page typewritten document entitled First draft of a report on
the EDVAC [5]. By 1946, copies of this Report were being
distributed widely and were read with interest on both sides of
the Atlantic.
The June 1945 EDVAC Report was in fact a paper study,
more or less complete in principle but lacking engineering
detail. Once hostilities in the Pacific had ceased, there was
an understandable desire to consolidate wartime ideas and to
explain the EDVAC proposals to a wider (American) audience.
Accordingly, the US government funded an 8-week course
of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in July/August
1946 on the Theory and Techniques for Design of Electronic
Digital Computers. Twenty-eight scientists and engineers were
invited to attend. Among these were just three Englishmen:
David Rees, Maurice Wilkes and Douglas Hartree. David Rees
had worked at Bletchley Park and then, when the war ended,
had joined the Mathematics Department under Max Newman
at Manchester University. Maurice Wilkes had worked at the
Telecommunications Research Establishment during the war
and had returned to Cambridge University to resume his leading
role at the Mathematical Laboratory (later to become the
Computer Laboratory). Douglas Hartree, at that time Professor
of Physics at Manchester University but soon to move to

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FIGURE 1. Alan Turing in 1946, the year in which he was appointed

OBE (Order of the British Empire) for his wartime work, about which
nothing public could then be said.

Cambridge, attended as a computational techniques expert and

was invited to give a lecture on Solution of problems in applied
mathematics.
The EDVAC Report and the associated course of lectures
were the inspiration for several groups world-wide to consider
designing their own general-purpose electronic computers.
Certainly Maurice Wilkes pioneering computer design activity
at Cambridge University, described in the book, grew out of
the Pennsylvanian ideas. The American activities were also
of considerable interest to Max Newman, who had been at
Bletchley Park during the war. What happened subsequently
at Manchester after 1946 is also explained.
Alan Turing had been shown a copy of the EDVAC Report
in June 1945. He had left Bletchley Park 12 months previously
and had become immersed in the design of an electronic speechencryption device called Delilah at a nearby secret government
research establishment (Hanslope Park). The prototype Delilah
began to work in the summer of 1945. At Hanslope Park Turing
had also started to experiment with a crude form of an air-filled
delay-line store.
On 1 October 1945 Turing joined the National Physical
Laboratory (NPL), with a brief to design what became known
as ACE, the Automatic Computing Engine, intended by NPL to
be the British answer to EDVAC. By the end of 1945, Turing
had produced his ACE Report, entitled Proposed electronic
calculator [6], which used the terminology of von Neumanns
EDVAC Report but which was much broader in scope than
EDVAC. Turing firmly believed in the desirability for one
program to be able to modify another. Compared with the
EDVAC Report, Turing demonstrated a better understanding of
nested subroutine calling/return and his report contains much
more practical discussion about program preparation.
Historians now judge Turings ACE Report to be the first
substantially complete description of a practical stored-program
computer. The document was very detailed, running to the
modern equivalent of 83 printed pages including 25 pages
of diagrams. By way of further explanation, Turings Report
was what we would now call a register-level and system-level
description, rather than a precise engineering design, though it
did contain sample electronic circuits, an estimate of the cost
(11 200, equivalent to perhaps 250 000 in 2012) and a guess
that the computer could be built within about a year. These
estimates soon proved to be wildly optimistic. There was also
an 11-page section giving a detailed mathematical analysis of
delay-line storage.
By 1947, and in the wake of people such as Alan Turing
(NPL), Maurice Wilkes (Cambridge) and Max Newman
(Manchester), teams at several other British laboratories had
begun to design universal stored-program digital computers.
These people included Andrew Booth at Birkbeck College,
Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn in the Electrical Engineering
Department at Manchester and John Coales real-time gunnery
control group at the Borehamwood Research Laboratories of
Elliott Brothers (London) Ltd.

A Synopsis of the Book Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

781

Wartime know-how developed at UK and US radar,

communications and cryptanalysis research establishments,
(including the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania)

People

People

1945
UK government
projects at
GCHQ, TRE, etc.

UK universities &
research centres.

UK Industry
Elliott

Modified
Colossus

Cambridge

Lyons
Defence

Birkbeck

SSEM

Mark I

Elliott 152

EDSAC
Pilot ACE

Mark I
Other rapid
analytical
machines

Nicholas

TREAC
OEDIPUS

401

MOSAIC

1950

LEO

English
Electric

APE(R)C

Mark I*

BTM

Elliott 153
Etc. etc.

1200
Elliott 403

402

DEUCE

1955
The computer market-place

FIGURE 2. The flow of ideas and techniques that came from government war-time research, via pioneering prototype projects and into the market
place as commercially available British computers.

One factor characterized all of the above people: they knew

that the principal problem in building a practical stored-program
computer lay in devising a cost-effective storage device of
sufficient capacity and speed. Furthermore, all had become
aware that secret wartime radar technologies were most likely
to provide the answers to the problem of high-speed storage.
Figure 2, taken from the book, shows the spirit of this
migration of people and know-how from government research
establishments, through university and industrial laboratories
and into the market place, during the period 194555. The
various computers in Fig. 2 are all described in the book.

3. THE PROJECTS AND PLACES

It is natural to focus attention on Alan Turings research at
NPL because, at the start of 1946, NPL was arguably the most
promising location from which the worlds first working storedprogram computer was expected to emerge. In the event, this
was not to be. For reasons that do not reflect well on either Turing
or the NPL senior staff, Turings ACE project suffered many
redesigns and delays [7]. Eventually a Pilot model of ACE came
to life on 10 May 1950 (see Fig. 3). Meanwhile, Turing had spent
the period October 1947 to September 1948 on sabbatical leave

at Cambridge where, among other things, he produced what we

now judge to be a seminal paper on Artificial Intelligence [8].
No doubt the NPL Director, Sir Charles Darwin, was
dismayed by Turings apparent change of focus. Others
probably saw this coming. In 1946, Turing had written to a
friend that: In working on the ACE I am more interested in
the possibility of producing models of the brain than in the
practical applications to computing. Indeed, for several years
prior to arriving at NPL Alan Turing had been musing about
the concept of intelligent machines. It is not surprising that,
when listing future applications of ACE in his 1945 Report,
he included the possibility of checking for winning moves in a
game of chess. Turing wrote:
Can the machine play chess? It could fairly easily be made to
play a rather bad game. It would be bad because chess requires
intelligence. We stated at the beginning of this section that the
machine should be treated as entirely without intelligence. There are
indications however that it is possible to make the machine display
intelligence at the risk of its making occasional serious mistakes.
By following up this aspect the machine could probably be made to
play very good chess.

Returning to chronology, in May 1948 Turing handed in his

resignation to the NPL Director. Turing moved to Manchester

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Code
breaking

NPL

Manchester

Ferranti

782

S. Lavington

in early October 1948 [9], where his job title was Deputy
Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory, with the status
of a Reader in the Mathematics Department under Professor
Newman. (Max Newman had obtained a substantial grant from
the Royal Society in July 1946 but had made no progress towards
purchase of Laboratory equipment for the simple reason that
no equipment of the desired functionality was yet available
commercially.)
Apart from his friendship with Max Newman, who was his
former supervisor at Cambridge and colleague at Bletchley
Park, why had Turing chosen to move to Manchester? It was
because an untidy collection of idiosyncratic wizardry known
as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) had run its
first stored program in the Electrical Engineering Department
at Manchester on 21 June 1948a world first. Designed by
Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, the SSEM was at that stage
far from user-friendly. It was to be enthusiastically enhanced by
the engineers over the next 18 months. The honour of producing
the worlds first fully functional stored-program computer must
go to Maurice Wilkes research group at Cambridge, where
the EDSAC (see Fig. 4) ran its first program on 6 May
1949. The EDSACs Assembler and its well-organized library
of subroutines marked it as a computing resource that soon
attracted a following of enthusiastic users.
Nevertheless, the environment at Manchester in which
Turing found himself in October 1948 was certainly creative.
Turing took responsibility for devising an equally idiosyncratic
software system for what was by then known as the
Manchester Mark I computer which, by the spring of 1949,
was equipped with index registers and a drum secondary
store to back up its electrostatic cathode ray tube (CRT)

primary store. From this, the Manchester firm of Ferranti Ltd

built a re-engineered production version called the Ferranti
Mark I (see Fig. 5). Delivered on 12 February 1951, this
is believed to have been the worlds first commercially
available computer, a few weeks ahead of UNIVAC 1 in
America.
The full story of computer developments at Manchester and
Ferranti, Cambridge and Lyons, at Birkbeck and the British
Tabulating Machine Company, at Elliotts Borehamwood
Laboratory, and at NPL and English Electric are recounted in
chapters 27 of the book. Supported by a technical Appendix,
the hardware and software characteristics of all the resulting
computers are compared in some detail. Predictably, the initial
end-user applications were mostly in science and engineering,
save for the notable exception of a computer called LEO, Lyons
Electronic Office. LEO was a one-off, enhanced version of the
Cambridge EDSAC [10].
Apart from LEO, business data-processing applications took
some time to become established in the market place. This can
be seen from Table 1, taken from the book, which enumerates
all of the commercially available British-designed computers
to have been delivered by the end of 1955. At this point,
no computers from overseas had penetrated the UK home
market. Competition was, however, not long in arriving on these
shores. By June 1962, there was a total of 380 computer
installations in the country, supplied by 14 manufacturers
(8 British, 5 American and 1 French). By September 1968,
foreign and domestic competition had caused all of the British
mainframe computer manufacturers to be combined in a flurry
of mergers and take-overs to form a single entity: International
Computers Ltd (ICL). Alas, ICL itself is now no more,

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FIGURE 3. The Pilot ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory in 1950. Three of the design team are shown (left-to-right): G. G. Alway,
E. A. Newman and J. H. Wilkinson.

A Synopsis of the Book Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

783

FIGURE 5. The Ferranti Mark I computer in 1951, showing the operators control console between the rows of cabinets holding the logic circuitry.
The person standing to the right of the console is Alan Turing.

having been gradually absorbed into Fujitsu during the period

19812001.
4. ALAN TURING IN PERSPECTIVE
At Manchester University, Alan Turings involvement in
hardware and software design began to fade [11]. His fertile

mind soon returned to the question Can computers think?

Following a formal discussion on The Mind and the Computing
Machine held in the Philosophy Department on 27 October
1949, Turing wrote up his views in the journal Mind [12]. In this
paper, while trying to answer the question can machines think?
he devised the well-known Turing Test. Then in February 1950
he started working on his mathematical theory of embryology

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FIGURE 4. The Cambridge EDSAC, shortly after its completion in May 1949.

784

S. Lavington
TABLE 1. The first 5 years of UK computer production: total deliveries to external customers, 19511955.
Year delivered

Customer

Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
Elliott 401
Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
Elliott 402
Elliott 402
BTM 1200 (HEC2M)
BTM 1200 (HEC2M)
Ferranti Mark I
Ferranti Mark I
English Electric DEUCE
English Electric DEUCE

Manchester University
Toronto University
Ministry of Supply (GCHQ, Cheltenham)
Agricultural Research Council, Rothamsted
Royal Dutch Shell Labs, Amsterdam
Atomic Weapons Research Est., Aldermaston
A V Roe & Co Ltd, Manchester
Institut Blaise Pascal, France
Army Operational Research Group, West Byfleet
GEC Research Labs, Wembley
ESSO Oil Refinery, Fawley
National Inst. for Applications of Maths, Rome
Ministry of Supply, Fort Halstead
National Physical Lab, Teddington
Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough

(morphogenesis). He was interested in the growth and form

of living things and was fascinated by symmetry in nature.
His seminal paper, The Chemical basis of Morphogenesis, was
published in August 1952 [13]. Turing himself rated this as
equally important as his 1936 paper On Computable Numbers.
Interestingly, Turing wrote in 1950 that he thought his work on
morphogenesis is not altogether unconnected with his interest
in brain cells and the physiological basis of memory and pattern
recognition.
For the next 18 months Turing continued to tackle the harder
areas of morphogenesis such as explaining the patterns found in
monocellular Radiolaria. He used the Ferranti Mark I computer
to solve the complex partial differential equations. Alas, he
was destined to leave this work unfinished. On 7 June 1954,
Alan Turing was found dead in his house at Wilmslow, south of
Manchester, having apparently eaten an apple dipped in cyanide.
His death was completely unexpected, coming as a great shock
to all who knew him. It is now thought that personal problems,
including the difficulties he encountered in the restrictive society
of the 1950s concerning his sexual orientation, contributed to
the sad end of this genius.
The book concludes with a chapter that attempts to assess
Turings contribution to the design of practical computer
hardware and softwareperhaps a more pedestrian (but
also more difficult) agenda than assessing Turings major
contributions to the more theoretical areas of mathematics,
cryptanalysis and embryology.
To his contemporaries in the small world of early British
computing, Alan Turing was certainly well-knowneven held
in awe. If his ideas on computer design were not as influential
as might be supposed by his renown, it is possibly because he
was not by nature an easy person with whom to communicate.
Turing would often resort to deriving solutions rapidly from

Application
Scientific and engineering
Mathematical research
Classified work
Agricultural statistics
Oil refining studies
Research work
Aircraft design calculations
Mathematical research
Operational research
?? (application unknown)
Scheduling and planning
Research work
Defence-related research
Mathematical applications
Aircraft research

first principles. At NPL in 1946/7, Turings many revisions of

his design for the ACE computer must have exasperated his
colleagues. One wonders why Turing did not publish his ACE
design more widely, making it clear how his computer was based
on the Universal Turing Machine of 1936?
Even if Turing had published more widely, it is far from
certain that his architecture and register-level structure of ACE
would have been adopted by other computer designers. Turings
pursuit of hardware cost-effectiveness imposed a considerable
burden on the programmer. Other designs may not have
been so efficient but they were generally much more userfriendly.
By way of illustration, Turing was thoroughly dismissive of
the Cambridge EDSAC. In December 1946 he wrote:
The code which he [Wilkes] suggests is however very contrary
to the line of development here [at NPL], and much more in the
American tradition of solving ones difficulties by means of much
equipment rather than by thought. I should imagine that to put
his code (which is advertised as reduced to the simplest possible
form) into effect would require a very much more complex control
circuit than is proposed in our full-size machine. It is clearly
rank folly to develop a complex control merely for the sake of a
pilot model.

In turn, Wilkes wrote later that he

found Turing very opinionated and considered that his ideas
were widely at variance with what the main stream of computer
development was going to be.

In 1947 Andrew Booth, the inspiration behind the British

Tabulating Machine Companys HEC (see Fig. 6) computer and
BTM 1200 series, said of the ACE instruction set that the code
is rather complex, and more suited to the needs of mathematical
logic than of the processes of arithmetic. It is not easy to explain

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1951
1952
1953
1954
1954
1954
1954
1955
1955
1955
1955
1955
1955
1955
1955

Computer

A Synopsis of the Book Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

785

FIGURE 7. The Elliott 153 computer in 1954. This was used for rapid plotting of Direction Finding (DF) signal intercepts at GCHQs Irton Mooor
Establishment near Scarborough.

Booths views without going into a detailed analysis of Turings

1945 ACE Report and the various modifications proposed to the
ACE architecture over the next couple of years. Here, however,
are examples of what lay behind Booths remarks.
Of the many interesting features in Alan Turings original
design for ACE, two may seem strange to modern eyes. Firstly,

an ACE instruction made no explicit mention of op codes or

a main accumulator. Instead, arithmetic and logical functions
were specified implicitly when certain source or destination
locations occurred in an instruction. Secondly, the 1945/6 ACE
Report had no explicit instructions for conditional branching.
Thus, to branch conditionally upon the value of a bit Di.e. to

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FIGURE 6. The HEC1 (Hollerith Electronic Computer) in 1951, built by the British Tabulating Machines Company (BTM) to the design of
Andrew Booth.

786

S. Lavington

carry out the equivalent of:

If D = 1, then go to JA, else if D = 0, then go to JB,
it was first necessary to do the following computation on the
next instruction part of an instruction C held in the store:
(next instruction part of C) := ((D JA) + (1 D) JB).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The book Alan Turing and his contemporaries: building the
worlds first computers is a collaboration between the author
and Chris Burton, Martin Campbell-Kelly and Roger Johnson.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge their invaluable technical
input. The books publication has been sponsored by the
Computer Conservation Society and by the British Computer
Society. Finally, the author is grateful for the advice and
encouragement of Keith van Rijsbergen in the writing of this
paper.

REFERENCES
[1] Randell, B. (1980) The COLOSSUS. In Metropolis, N, Howlett,
J. and Rota, G.-C. (eds), A History of Computing in the
Twentieth Century, pp. 4792. Academic Press. ISBN 0-12491650-3. (In the early 1970s Brian Randell took the lead
in persuading the government to release information about
Colossus. Some details of the war-time techniques and equipment
used at Bletchley Park are still the subject of the Official Secrets
Act).
[2] Turing, A.M. (1936) On Computable Numbers, with an
application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proc. London Math.
Soc. (2), 42, 230265, 1936/7. (This paper, and references 8
and 11 below are helpfully reproduced in a book edited by B
J Copeland, entitled: The essential Turing: the ideas that gave
birth to the computer age, published by Oxford University Press
in 2004. ISBN: 978-0-19-825079-1).
[3] Lavington, S.H. (ed.) (2012) AlanTuring and his contemporaries:
building the worlds first computers. Published by the British
Computer Society, ISBN: 978-1-90612-490-498.
[4] Goldstine, H.H. and Goldstine, A. (1982) [1946] The Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The Origins of
Digital Computers: Selected Papers, pp. 359373. Springer,
New York. ISBN 3-540-11319-3.
[5] von Neumann, J. (1945) First draft of a report on the
EDVAC. Contract no. W-670-ORD-4926 between the United
States Army Ordnance Department and the University of
Pennsylvania. Distributed by the Moore School of Electrical
Engineering, University of Pennsylvania and dated 30 June 1945.
http://www.archive.org/details/firstdraftofrepo00vonn.
[6] Turing, A.M. (1945) Proposed electronic calculator. Report
submitted to the Executive Committee of the National Physical
Laboratory in February 1946, under the description Report by
Dr A M Turing on proposals for the development of an Automatic
Computing Engine (ACE). (This Report is helpfully reproduced
in: B J Copeland (2005), Alan Turings Automatic Computing
Engine, published by Oxford University Press. ISBN: 0-19856593-3).

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We then cause the new instruction C to be obeyed.

To minimize the delays inherent in multi-word sequentially
accessed serial delay line stores, Turing devised an instruction
format that included a wait-number and a timing-number
in addition to a next-instruction address. By carefully
choosing values for these fields, execution times could be
minimized. This gave rise to the term optimum programming,
sometimes called minimum-latency programmingactivities
that demanded considerable skill on the part of the user. These
techniques did not make sense if the primary memory was
random access, as in the electrostatic CRT stores used in the
Manchester and Ferranti computers of the period. At length,
once cost-effective and reliable ferrite core RAM became more
widely available in the late 1950s, Turings ACE philosophy
became somewhat redundant.
Of all the machines described in the book, perhaps the Elliott
153 (see Fig. 7) computer is the only one to come close in
spirit, if not in detail, to Turings ideal of trying to maximize the
speed and functionality to be derived from bit-serial hardware.
The Elliott designers approached this ideal by arranging lowlevel functional parallelism with multiple data-highways and
by choosing a relatively long 64-bit instruction [14]. The Elliott
153 computer was designed for a particular defence application
where cost was not a prime consideration. Turing worked with
much less hardware and a shorter but much more complex
instruction format. The result was that, apart from the Elliott
153, Pilot ACE was faster than other contemporary British
computers by about a factor of 5, while employing about onethird of the electronic equipment.
Perhaps it was not until about 30 years after his death that
Alan Turings influence and reputation came into its own within
the general computing community. By then, the Pilot ACE
instruction format had largely been forgotten. By 1984, both
Artificial Intelligence and Computational Theory had for some
years been well-established sectors of the total discipline of
Computer Science. In both these sectors, Alan Turing was
regarded by many as the Founding Father. By 1984, western
society was becoming liberated from the sexual constraints
of the 1950s. In 1983, Andrew Hodges had published his
authoritative biography [9] of Alan Turing.
Perhaps of more significance for Turings posthumous
reputation, in the early 1970s details of the wartime
cryptanalysis efforts at Bletchley Park started to be released
into the public domain [1]. It then became possible for people
to understand why Alan Turing had been awarded an OBE at the
end of the war. For his work at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing had

by the 1980s become a national treasure in the publics mind.

So for Bletchley Park, and for several other reasons touched
on in this book, Alan Turing surely deserves to be remembered
today as an undoubted National Treasure.

A Synopsis of the Book Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

[11] Turing, A.M. (1951) Local Programming Methods and

Conventions. Proc. Manchester University Computer Inaugural
Conf., Manchester, July 1951. Published by the University of
Manchester. (This event is believed to have marked Turings
final public appearance at any computer conference. In the
spring of 1951 Turing had also anonymously written the
Programmers Handbook for Manchester Electronic Computer
Mark II, an undated 109-page manual, typed and reproduced by
the Computing Machine Laboratory, University of Manchester.
Despite the somewhat confusing title, this document refers to the
computer that soon became known as the Ferranti Mark I. A
second edition of the Programmers Handbook was produced in
August 1952 by R A Brooker, who had taken over from Turing the
responsibility for software development and systems organisation
at Manchester in October 1951).
[12] Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence.
Mind, 59, 433460. (This paper is helpfully reprinted in
Copelands 2004 book see [2] above).
[13] Turing, A.M. (1952) The chemical basis of Morphogenesis.
Philos. Trans. R. Soc., B237, 3772, August. (This paper is
helpfully reprinted in Copelands 2004 book see [2] above).
[14] Lavington, S.H. (2011) Moving Targets: Elliott-Automation
and the Dawn of the Computer Age in Britain, 194767.
Springer. ISBN 978-1-84882-932-9. (More information on the
production computers manufactured by Elliotts, Ferranti Ltd.,
Leo Computers Ltd., EMI Ltd., English Electric Ltd., British
Tabulating Machine Co. and International Computers and
Tabulators Ltd. in the period 1950 1965 can be found at:
http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/).

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[7] Yates, D.M. (1997) Turings Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory, 19451995.
Published by the Science Museum, London. ISBN: 0-91080594-7.
[8] Turing, A.M. (1948) Intelligent Machinery. This Report was
submitted to the NPL Directorate. Sir Charles Darwin, the head
of NPL, judged the report to be not suitable for publication and
it was filed away. Two edited versions were eventually published
posthumously: (a) in: Evans C.R. and Robertson A.D.J. (1968),
Key papers: Cybernetics. Published by Butterworths, London;
(b) Meltzer, B and Michie, D (1969), Machine Intelligence 5.
Published by Edinburgh University Press. (Helpfully, Turings
original text was then re-printed in: Copeland B J (2004), The
essential Turing: the ideas that gave birth to the computer
age, published by Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19825079-1).
[9] Hodges, A. (1983) Alan Turing: The Enigma. Published by
Burnett Books. ISBN: 0-09-152130-0. (Anyone interested in the
life of Alan Turing should start with Andrew Hodgesclassic 600page biography. Unfortunately, this very carefully-researched
book does not give much detailed technical information on
Turings computer design activities).
[10] Pinkerton, J.M.M. and Kaye, E.J. (1954) LEOLyons Electronic
Office: part 1. Electronic Eng., 29, 284291. (More information
is provided on pages 335 341 and 386 392 of the same
volume. For a recent general account, see: Ferry, G (2003),
A computer called LEO: Lyons teashops and the worlds first
office computer. Published by Fourth Estate. ISBN 1-84115185-8).

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