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The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on November 6, 2009
The Computer Journal, doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxp093
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Personal Recollections of Programming DEUCE in the Late 1950s

Michael Wetherfield*

8 Bafford Lane, Charlton Kings, Cheltenham GL53 8DL, UK

* Corresponding author: robyw{at}machination.eclipse.co.uk

Received 3 February 2009; revised 20 September 2009

The author describes how he came to be employed, in 1957, as a programmer at Nelson Research Laboratories (Stafford), then the hub of the English Electric Company's software activities, at a time when the throughput of the English Electric DEUCE computer had just been potentially improved by doubling the amount of data that could be punched on each Hollerith input card, necessitating a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the decimal-to-binary conversions used by card-reading subroutines. The DEUCE delay-line store, instruction code and input–output system are described in enough detail to enable readers to understand the difficulties, and how they were resolved.

Key Words: English electric DEUCE computer • experience of programming DEUCE • DEUCE instruction code • programming challenge in response to DEUCE enhancement

Handling editor: Martin Campbell-Kelly


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