Alan Turing and his Contemporaries

7 INTO THE MARKETPLACE

Simon Lavington

OUT OF THE LABORATORY

The preceding chapters have described the main British research projects that were active from 1945 to 1952. What was it that pulled these pioneering digital designs out of the laboratories and into the real world? The answers are to be found by looking at the needs of real-world users with real-world problems. First, though, a word of caution: different users had different traditional ways of solving problems and different views of whether the new breed of stored-program digital computer could be of any help. We shall deal with three applications areas, to make the point that there were interesting variations in the rate at which different groups of people began to take an interest ...