Alan Turing's automatic computing engine
During World War II Alan Turing's work on Colossus enabled the Allies to crack German ciphers. After the war he worked on the ACE, or automatic computing engine. This volume traces the genesis and development of ACE and examines how it became the forerunner of the modern computer system.
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- Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine by Jack Copeland http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turings-Automatic-Computing-Engin...
- Glancing at the bibliography, I notice that the author of this article, B. Jack Copeland, also wrote a book entitled Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to Build the Modern Computer. It makes a little more sense in that context, using "modern computer" to mean broadly what we now thing of as a computer, i.e. an electronic, stored-program, general-purpose computer, versus previous more special-purpose and/or electromechanical computing machines.
It still reads funnily to me when phrased as "the modern history of computing", though. The book title's approach, which is more like "the history of how we got to the modern computer", makes clearer what he means.
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