Personal Recollections of Programming DEUCE in the Late 1950s

The author describes how he came to be employed, in 1957, as a programmer at Nelson Research Laboratories (Stafford), then the hub of the English Electric Company’s software activities, at a time when the throughput of the English Electric DEUCE computer had just been potentially improved by doubling the amount of data that could be punched on each Hollerith input card, necessitating a corresponding increase in the efficiency of the decimal-to-binary conversions used by card-reading subroutines. The DEUCE delay-line store, instruction code and input–output system are described in enough detail to enable readers to understand the difficulties, and how they were resolved.