Programme Design for a High-Speed Automatic Calculating Machine

Problems intended to be solved with the aid of a high speed digital calculating machine must first be reduced to a series of arithmetical operations. These, together with various auxiliary operations required for such purposes as keeping count of the number of times a particular routine has been repeated, must then be expressed in the code appropriate to the machine. The paper contains an account of some of the details of this process, with special reference to the EDSAC, a high-speed electronic machine in the University Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge. Simple examples are given. These have been specially designed to illustrate the use of conditional orders and the way in which arithmetical operations may be performed on orders.