[SIGCIS-Members] Reply from Paul McJones re Turing's ACE proposal

Tue Apr 3 11:14:38 PDT 2012

(Forwarded, as the list bounced his message.)

From: Paul McJones [mailto:paul at mcjones.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 11:21 AM
To: Brian Randell; Thomas Haigh
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] "Stored program" -- anyone know origins of the
PHRASE

This is to confirm that Turing's 1945/6 ACE proposal describes the ideas of
stored programs (starting on the very first page) but does not use that
terminology. Turing does use the word "storage" extensively, but he refers
to "instruction tables" rather than "programs". He demonstrates the use of
stored programs with an instruction table called INDEXIN that simulates what
we would call an indexed load. He also mentions that various aspects of
program preparation (e.g., relocating subroutines) could be done within the
machine itself, but for pragmatic reasons suggest it be done externally
using punched card machines.

For those interested, a scan of the 1972 NPL reprint is available here:

http://www.npl.co.uk/turing/pilot-ace-proposal

and a scan of the original 1946 report is here:

http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/C/32

For anyone interested in studying Turing's report I recommend this paper:

The other Turing machine

B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran

Computer Journal, Volume 20, Issue 3, Pp. 269-279.

http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/3/269.abstract

(I learned of the paper by Carpenter and Doran in Brian Randell's The
Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers.) 

Paul

On Apr 2, 2012, at 1:44 PM, Brian Randell wrote:

Hi Tom:

Not directly responding to your query, and commenting from memory, rather
than having rechecked my sources, my recollection is that the 1945 First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC did not allow operations on stored
instructions, but Turing's 1945 proposal for ACE did - to my mind a
necessary final step towards the generality that I associate with the stored
program computer concept.

Cheers

Brian

On 2 Apr 2012, at 21:34, Thomas Haigh wrote:

Hello everyone,

I have a query related to a project I am working on concerning the

conversion of ENIAC to stored program control in 1948, initially to run the

first computerized Monte Carlo calculations. All this took place prior to

the first operation of the Manchester Baby. That makes the question of what

one means by "stored program" a very interesting one.

This question was much discussed in the early days of the history of

computing (1970s, early 1980s). I am starting to dig back into primary

sources for early use of the phrases "stored program" and "stored program

concept" to get a better idea of how these terms were used in the

1940s/early 1950s and what people thought they meant at the time. 

To clarify, almost everyone who has written about this cites the 1945 "First

Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" as the initial dissemination of the stored

program concept although there has been considerable debate as to the source

of the ideas contained therein. However that document does not contain the

phase "stored program." Or indeed use the word "program" in the body of the

text. Or, remarkably, "EDVAC." "Stored" shows up a few times, though less

frequently than "remembered." So, ignoring for the moment the relationship

of the report to later definitions of the concept, we can agree that it was

not the source of the phrase. The most obvious summary of the idea using the

report's own terminology would be "remembered instruction device" rather

than "stored program computer." 

I had thought about the 1946 Moore School lectures as a possible vector for

the phase "stored program" as well as the concept. The phrase shows up many

times in the Moore School lectures book but so far I have spotted it only in

the 1980s editorial material rather than in the original lecture summaries. 

By 1954 "stored program computer" is showing up without explanation or

citation required in the description of the IBM 650 published in the

inaugural issue of Journal of the ACM. It is not particularly common in the

ACM DL material for the rest of the decade ("automatic computer" and

"digital computer" are more prevalent) but continues to pop up occasionally.

The best the OED can do is 1957, which is even later.

So, any thoughts on who came up with this phrase and when? I'm planning to

dig deeper in search of early usage, for example into the 1950 "High-Speed

Computing Devices" ERA book and some of the other CBI reprints from the

1940s, but it occurred to me that someone on the list might already know the

answer to the question.

Tom

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