History of NPL Computing
Donald Davies
During the second half of the twentieth century, the use of computers transformed life in the developed world.
NPL is one of the places that gave birth to modern computing; Alan Turing played a leading role and his plans led to the development of the Pilot ACE and ACE computers.
In the 1960s, NPL played a leading part in the marriage of computer and communications, with the development by Donald Davies of computer networks based on packet switching.
| Signficant Dates | |
| 1945 | Alan Turing joins NPL |
| 1946 | Turing's plans for ACE |
| 1950 | Pilot ACE computer |
| 1957 | ACE computer |
| 1960 | Contribution to the development of ALGOL 60 |
| 1963 | Wilkinson's work on error analysis |
| 1964 | Cyclops: automatic character recognitionx - Pattern recognition |
| 1966 | Proposal for digital communications networkx - Packet switching |
| 1967 | Machine translation - from Russian to English |
| 1970 | The NPL Network - first local-area network in the world |
| 1971 | Scrapbookx - pioneering combination of word processing, electronic mail and hypertext |
| 1980 | Pascal compiler validation |
| 1987 | Conformance testing of communication protocols and data security |
ACE Pilot Model 1950
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