COMPUTING – DEUCE Manuscript programming guide for the DEUCE computer, 1961

COMPUTING – DEUCE Manuscript programming guide for the DEUCE computer, titled 'DEUCE/ (Basic)' and dated '28.8.1961 to 28.11.1961' on upper cover, written in blue ink on lined paper, additional pages on squared paper and English Electric Co. headed paper, interspersed with circuit diagrams and charts in pencil and crayon, beginning with 'Programming' ('...Alpha Code/ Punched card layout: The Mantissa is always punched in cols 23/31 on the card and the exponent in cols 40/42. The system of ferating decimal points must be used. The form of the alpha code is:- a = b f c... There are two constants available: - 0 and 1...'), going on to explain Binary Arithmetic, 'Deuce Addresses', 'List of test programmes...', 'Control' (including 'Program Display' and 'Instruction Staticisors'), 'Request Stop', 'The Monitor', 'Logical Operations', 'Hollerith Equipment', operation of the 'Punch' ('...the Geneva wheel moves the card through the punch station with an intermittent motion...'), 'Magnetic Backing Store', etc., additional glossary of abbreviations on loose leaf at front, 80 leaves, dust-staining, general marks and creasing, rust-staining from metal binding affecting loose leaf and first seven leaves, in a cardboard 'Lawco Springer' file by Lawtons of Liverpool, marked and worn, edges frayed, water damage to edges, two metal filing holes, 340 x 210mm., August to November 1961 Footnotes: DEUCE: A PROGRAMMING GUIDE FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE COMPUTERS. The DEUCE (Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine) was one of the earliest British commercially available computers, built by English Electric from 1955, and was a successor to the Pilot ACE, itself a cut-down version of Alan Turing's pioneering ACE. A total of thirty-three DEUCE machines were sold between 1955 and 1964. It was a room-sized computer which sold for around £60,000 and, whilst '...unsuitable for commercial data processing... it sold well to organisations with big computational requirements... in terms of raw computational speed it was the best value machine on the market...' (Martin Campbell-Kelly, 'Ace', in Copeland, Bowen, Sprevak, Wilson et al., The Turing Guide, Oxford, 2017, p.219). Although fundamentally difficult to programme, especially for a novice (Campbell-Kelly calls it 'horrendously' difficult), it was of particular benefit to the aircraft industry and was sold to the major aerospace manufacturers as well as the defence and research organisations. Our document appears to be a basic guide loosely organised along similar lines to the more comprehensive printed programming manual published by the English Electric Company in 1956. Provenance: Given to the present owner at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, where he was working on DEUCE: '...I was booked onto a training course but this was delayed for several months and in the meantime I was handed a rather scruffy file which was labelled 'DEUCE Basic'. This turned out to be a complete introduction to computing and DEUCE in particular...'. He had previously worked for J. Lyons & Co on developing the LEO computer and was drafted to Teddington when the company merged with English Electric in the early 1960's. Whilst at the NPL he saw Turing's pioneering ACE before it was finally taken down: '...how many of us are still around who felt and witnessed the thrill and pleasure of being involved in the first commercial computer applications that the world had ever seen?...'. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing