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B. Jack Copeland: From the Entscheidungsproblem to the Personal
Computer
Abstract
Gödel's classic paper of 1931 did not settle Hilbert's
Entscheidungsproblem.
The young logician Alan Turing took up the problem and in the course of
his attack conceived the basic principle of the modern computer -
the idea of controlling the machine's operations by means of a program of
coded instructions stored in the computer's memory. In 1936, at Cambridge,
Turing described the abstract universal digital computing machine on which
the modern computer is based. The transition from mathematical logic to
electronic hardware took 12 years, and Turing played a central role.
This lecture charts the development of the electronic stored-program
digital computer, from the extraordinary Colossus computers built for
code-breaking during the second world war to the first successful run of a
stored program in 1948. Turing's own Automatic Computing Engine, the
fastest of the pioneer machines, became a cornerstone of the fledgling
British computer industry, and was the inspiration for the earliest
commercially available single-user computers. |
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