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Language peer sets for Turing autocode:
United Kingdom↑
United Kingdom/1952↑
Designed 1952 ↑
1950s languages ↑
First generation↑
Immediate Post-War↑
Genus Autocode Coeval ↑
Excluded from Sammet ↑
Autocode Coeval↑
Autocodes↑
UK historic algorithmic systems ↑
Autocode Coeval/1952↑
Autocodes/1952↑
UK historic algorithmic systems/1952↑
Autocode Coeval/United Kingdom↑
Autocodes/United Kingdom↑
UK historic algorithmic systems/United Kingdom↑
Excluded from Sammet ↑
Excluded from Sammet/1952↑
Excluded from Sammet/uk ↑
Turing autocode(ID:3914/tur005)
Turing
alternate simple view
Country: United Kingdom
Designed 1952
Genus: Autocode Coeval
Sammet category: Excluded from Sammet
Turing's autocode for the ACE and Deuce, largely incomprehensible it was said
"However with the appointment of Cicely Popplewell to Electrical Engineering in the summer of 1949, effort started to be put directly into satisfying the requirements of the programming community. In 1950 Turing and Cicely designed the programming system for the Ferranti Mark 1 (Scheme A), based on their experience with the Manchester Mark 1, and Turing wrote the first programming manual for it."
Cicely Popplewell may well be the world's first SysAd! "Cicely Popplewell concentrated on the practicalities of running the Computer Service."
Related languages
References:
Turing (1951) Turing, A.M.; "Programmers' Handbook (1st Edition) for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II" Manchester 1951
Online copy
Turing et al (1952) A.M. Turing, revised R.A. Brooker, C.M Popplewell "Programmers' Handbook (2nd Edition) for the Manchester Electronic Computer Mark II"
Manchester October 1952
Online copy
Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1982) Campbell-Kelly, Martin "The Development of Computer Programming in Britain (1945 to 1955)"
Extract:
Turing's awful system
Extract:
Conclusions
Abstract
in (1982) Annals of the History of Computing 4(2) April 1982 IEEE
Resources
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From Computer 50 Org However with the appointment of Cicely Popplewell to Electrical Engineering in the summer of 1949, effort started to be put directly into satisfying the requirements of the programming community. In 1950 Turing and Cicely designed the programming system for the Ferranti Mark 1 (Scheme A), based on their experience with the Manchester Mark 1, and Turing wrote the first programming manual for it.
But it was not really until Turing withdrew from active work on the Mark 1 project and R.A. (Tony) Brooker was appointed in 1951 as formal leader of the software side that Kilburn's Computer Group acquired a strong focus on users' requirements.
Tony Brooker led the software development, first improving the programming system (Scheme B) and then addressing the problem of user languages. There was no assembly language for the Mark 1, only an ingenious but daunting method of writing programs in binary using a base-32 character set, designed by Turing. Brooker bypassed the Assembly Language stage by designing a simple "high-level language", the Mark 1 Autocode, as an alternative to Turing's method. This was gratefully received (in 1954) by the programming community!
Cicely Popplewell concentrated on the practicalities of running the Computer Service. To provide a formal Computing Service for outside users was a requirement of the government money put into the project, and in the long term it was a major source of internal funding for future computer development. The power of the Ferranti Mark 1 was far more than was required by the department or even the University. As ever in Tom Kilburn's career the operation was a significant and pioneering one, due to the new situation created by the new computing development (though in this case Tony Brooker would have been able to bring in useful experience from Cambridge).
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Sumner on Scheme A I duly went, and said that Christopher sent me over to discuss using the computer. Turing's response was "Here, read that", handing me a book. It was the Mark 1 Program- ming Manual, which he had written himself. "Then go and see Cicely Poppelwell, who will give you some time on the machine, and start programming." End of conversation.
I disappeared for a couple of months, and discovered that the perfect way to write a tutorial textbook is to fill it full of examples, none of which work. That might be an exaggeration - let's say most didn't work. Turing was like that: if he wrote 'k' instead of 't', he knew it was 'k', so why bother to do all that proof reading? So all the programs written in Mark 1 code had slight errors in them, and by the time you had worked out what the code should have been you had become quite a competent programmer.
You then constructed your program. You know all the things you are taught to do nowadays: write a small module with clean interfaces, employing top down design; test your procedure; embed it; test it some more - all the good stuff we still try to teach students. I didn't do any of that. They gave me a problem and I simply wrote a program to print out the answers and took it to the machine. A few months later, it worked!
To achieve that I acquired a copy of the second edition of the manual, which was written by Tony Brooker. It is the most glorious piece of understatement you could imagine. At the beginning it says, "Much material has been taken over and altered, or only slightly modified, from the first edition written by AM Turing". `Slightly modified' meant about one character in every 20.
Brooker acknowledges Cicely Poppelwell, Nick Hoskin, Alec Glennie - names some readers might remember. There wasn't a big group working at that time.
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Scheme A page at Computer 50
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