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This chapter presents the nine lectures given by Turing and his assistant Jim Wilkinson from December 1946 to February 1947. The lectures add substantially to the understanding of the evolution of the design of the ACE. Turing and Wilkinson describe Versions V, VI, and VII of the design.

This chapter presents Alan M. Turing's report, ‘Proposed Electronic Calculator’. The report was submitted to the Executive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory in February 1946, under the description ‘Report by Dr. A. M. Turing on Proposals for the Development of an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)’. The design set out in ‘Proposed Electronic Calculator’ was the basis for all the ACE computers.

This chapter presents fragments from Turing's draft of ‘Proposed Electronic Calculator’. This material is of interest chiefly because of its remarks concerning the universal machine of Turing's 1936 paper ‘On Computable Numbers’. In 1947, Turing described electronic stored-programme digital computers as ‘practical versions of the universal machine’ and it is clear that in designing the ACE, his aim was to replace the paper tape of the universal machine with a practical form of memory for holding instructions and data, and to replace the abstract ‘scanner’ of the universal machine by a ‘central pool of electronic equipment’.