ENGINEERING RESEARCH ASSOCIATES. High-speed computing devices . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950. 8 o. Original dark blue cloth, pictorial dust-jacket. FIRST EDITION WITH THE VERY ARE DUST JACKET. THE FIRST TREATISE ON HOW TO BUILD AN ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTER. It provided a "cookbook" describing the available ingredients and how they worked for both digital and analog computers. Because it also explained the principles involved and gave examples, it was extremely useful. The book was prepared under the supervision of Charles Brown Tompkins, who wrote most of the text. Tompkins was vice-president for research at Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a computer company founded in 1946 by several ex-navy personnel who during the war had been engaged in designing and constructing cryptanalysis machines. This work was "first assembled in the form of a report to the Office of Naval Research, prepared under a provision of contract N6-ONR-240, Task 1, which called for 'an investigation and report on the status of development of computing machine components'" (p. v). The textbook version of this book was a commercial success. OOC 584. [ With: ] BOWDEN, Bertram Vivian (1910-89), ed. Faster than thought: A symposium on digital computing machines . London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1953. Original beige cloth, color printed dust-jacket, the design incorporating a storage pattern on a Ferranti Mark I CRT memory tube baseed on the Williams-Kilburn CRT storage design. FIRST EDITION. Begun as a sales brochure for Ferranti, this work became the most widely read early English introduction to electronic computing, remaining in print without changes as late as 1968. It was edited by Bowden, an employee of Ferranti Limited with a doctorate from Cambridge who was probably the first electronic computer salesman in England. The text by Bowden and twenty-four authors, of which only one was American, has a distinctly British bias with relatively little information about American machines. Most of the authors are either employees of Ferranti or on the staff of the Manchester University Computer Laboratory which was associated with Ferranti in developing electronic computers. The work contains much information on Babbage (including a reprint of the Lovelace translation of Menabrea's paper; see lot 33) and chapters on British computer projects of the 1940s and early 1950s. Among the twenty-four computer experts who contributed papers to his book were Andrew D. Booth ("Calculating machines at the Birkbeck College computation laboratory"), Alan Turing ("Digital computers applied to games"), J. M. Bennett of Ferranti ("Digital computation and the crystallographer"), and Frederic C. Williams ("The University of Manchester computing machine"). On p. xvi of the FIRST EDITION Maurice Wilkes was incorrectly credited with authorship of Bennett's chapter. Instead Wilkes was the author of "Calculating machine development at Cambridge." Turing's chapter documents his moderately successful work on programming the Manchester machine to imitate human thought processes, in this case game-playing. He described the first machine capable of playing a complete game of chess. Since Turing died in 1954, this is one of his later publications (see lot 198). The chapter by Bennett on the applications of electronic computers to crystallography is an adaptation of work he and John Kendrew did on EDSAC, slanted with references to work done on the Ferranti computer at Manchester (see lot 147). In keeping with the commercial aims of this book to assist in selling Ferranti computers, the illustrations in the book frequently depict Ferranti products. OOC 504.
ENGINEERING RESEARCH ASSOCIATES. High-speed computing devices . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950. 8 o. Original dark blue cloth, pictorial dust-jacket. FIRST EDITION WITH THE VERY ARE DUST JACKET. THE FIRST TREATISE ON HOW TO BUILD AN ELECTRONIC DIGITAL COMPUTER. It provided a "cookbook" describing the available ingredients and how they worked for both digital and analog computers. Because it also explained the principles involved and gave examples, it was extremely useful. The book was prepared under the supervision of Charles Brown Tompkins, who wrote most of the text. Tompkins was vice-president for research at Engineering Research Associates (ERA), a computer company founded in 1946 by several ex-navy personnel who during the war had been engaged in designing and constructing cryptanalysis machines. This work was "first assembled in the form of a report to the Office of Naval Research, prepared under a provision of contract N6-ONR-240, Task 1, which called for 'an investigation and report on the status of development of computing machine components'" (p. v). The textbook version of this book was a commercial success. OOC 584. [ With: ] BOWDEN, Bertram Vivian (1910-89), ed. Faster than thought: A symposium on digital computing machines . London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1953. Original beige cloth, color printed dust-jacket, the design incorporating a storage pattern on a Ferranti Mark I CRT memory tube baseed on the Williams-Kilburn CRT storage design. FIRST EDITION. Begun as a sales brochure for Ferranti, this work became the most widely read early English introduction to electronic computing, remaining in print without changes as late as 1968. It was edited by Bowden, an employee of Ferranti Limited with a doctorate from Cambridge who was probably the first electronic computer salesman in England. The text by Bowden and twenty-four authors, of which only one was American, has a distinctly British bias with relatively little information about American machines. Most of the authors are either employees of Ferranti or on the staff of the Manchester University Computer Laboratory which was associated with Ferranti in developing electronic computers. The work contains much information on Babbage (including a reprint of the Lovelace translation of Menabrea's paper; see lot 33) and chapters on British computer projects of the 1940s and early 1950s. Among the twenty-four computer experts who contributed papers to his book were Andrew D. Booth ("Calculating machines at the Birkbeck College computation laboratory"), Alan Turing ("Digital computers applied to games"), J. M. Bennett of Ferranti ("Digital computation and the crystallographer"), and Frederic C. Williams ("The University of Manchester computing machine"). On p. xvi of the FIRST EDITION Maurice Wilkes was incorrectly credited with authorship of Bennett's chapter. Instead Wilkes was the author of "Calculating machine development at Cambridge." Turing's chapter documents his moderately successful work on programming the Manchester machine to imitate human thought processes, in this case game-playing. He described the first machine capable of playing a complete game of chess. Since Turing died in 1954, this is one of his later publications (see lot 198). The chapter by Bennett on the applications of electronic computers to crystallography is an adaptation of work he and John Kendrew did on EDSAC, slanted with references to work done on the Ferranti computer at Manchester (see lot 147). In keeping with the commercial aims of this book to assist in selling Ferranti computers, the illustrations in the book frequently depict Ferranti products. OOC 504.
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