Computer Pioneers - Tom Vickers

[Geoff Wearmouth]

Computer pioneer Tom Vickers is 93 and reflects here on his work with
Alan Turing, the Pilot Ace at NPL and his co-workers.

He was one of the first programmers to use binary floating point (as
on the ZX Spectrum) and decimal floating point (as on the Jupiter
Ace).

He is interviewed here, in two parts, by his granddaughter and bridge
partner Harriet.

http://goo.gl/CkNhF

Click the link on the right for Part 2

In the first part he refers to the freedom he experienced working with
Alan Turing - not like these days where "as your Dad will know"
Government departments and universities have to fight for resources.

"Her Dad" is Steven Vickers who wrote the ROMs and manuals of the
Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum and Jupiter Ace.

A fascinating interview.

G.

[Brian Gaff]

What can one say? I did not get the connection until now.

Brian

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"Geoff Wearmouth" <gwear...@gmail.com> wrote in message
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[Geoff Wearmouth]

> What can one say? I did not get the connection until now.

Another colleague of Tom Vickers was Chebyshev technology expert
Charles Clenshaw who joined Turing in 1946 from university. His tables
and methods for sine and cosine etc. were published by NPL in 1954 and
to 20 decimal places in 1962. The ZX Spectrum uses his method for
trigonometric functions - even square roots.

The Turing archive at Cambridge contains this 1953 six-page document
from Tom Vickers concerning the migration of code from the Pilot Ace
to the production Ace - DEUCE.
It is a little hard to read in particular the first page which
contains a distribution list including J G Hayes and Mike Woodger.

http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/archive/l/l17/L17-006.html

In his writings Tom gives credit for the lion's share of the work on
these routines to James Wilkinson who worked with Tom for the Ministry
of Supply at Fort Halstead.

Tom also contributed to the book "Modern Computing Methods" 1957 which
was revised by Clenshaw in 1961 and became a standard work until the
1980s.

NPL has just uploaded this 1980 video of Mike Woodger and Jim
Wilkinson to YouTube discussing the Pilot Ace, Turing and "version H".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf28IJmm-P4

--
G.

[Geoff Wearmouth]

> NPL has just uploaded this 1980 video of Mike Woodger and Jim

> Wilkinson to YouTube discussing the Pilot Ace...
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf28IJmm-P4

And here they are in a 1952 Daily Mirror cartoon entitled
"The Pilot Ace at The National Physical Laboratory"
Wilkinson demonstrates the machine's prowess by converting
a 20th century date to a day of the week.

The example programs in the ZX Spectrum manual were written by
the daughter of Tom Vickers - Penny Vickers.

I had a nice email from Steve when I wrongly credited him with the
authorship of these programs on my website.

Now I know why the first program in the Appendix converts a date to a
day.

It's taken some time :-)

--
G.

[Geoff Wearmouth]

> And here they are in a 1952 Daily Mirror cartoon entitled
> "The Pilot Ace at The National Physical Laboratory"

http://goo.gl/pwXHj

Taken from a hardback by Jack Copeland that is out in paperback in May
2012.

[Geoff Wearmouth]

Tom Vickers and Mike Woodger on YouTube

Piloting Computing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEQ6cnwaY_s

--
G.

[Geoff]

> Piloting Computing
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEQ6cnwaY_s

Steve mentions the NPL video on his University Web Page "Models of Computation"

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~sjv/teaching/models/

To quote
"The NPL commissioned a short film "Piloting Computing" of interviews with some people who worked there at the time. (I have a particular interest in it because it was made by my daughter Harriet Vickers and one of her interviewees is my father Tom!)"

The NPL Turing site is here.

http://www.npl.co.uk/turing/

--
Geoff.