Turing’s design was captured in his “Proposed Electronic Calculator,” written for the National Physical Laboratory in the brief interval between being shown the EDVAC report in September 1945 and the end of the year. He delivered a complete description of a million-cycle-per-second Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), accompanied by circuit diagrams, a detailed physical and logical analysis of the internal storage system, sample programs, detailed (if bug-ridden) subroutines, and even an estimated cost of £11,200.41 As Sara Turing later explained, her son’s goal was “to see his logical theory of
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