But even apart from the politics of the machine, Alan had come too late to direct its development.
不过,即使不考虑政治方面,图灵仍然来得太晚了。
Already the important decision had been taken to adopt, for use as a large, slow, backing store, a rotating magnetic drum such as A.
他们已经决定采用旋转式磁鼓,作为一个大容量、低速存储器。
With digits stored on tracks around the drum to be read off by a head, this was equivalent to providing a large number of slow, cheap, delay lines for the storage of data and instructions not immediately in use.
数据可以存储在磁道上,被一个磁头读取,这在效果上等同于大量的低速、低成本延迟线。
Another innovation in the design, a modification originally suggested by Newman, was that of the 'B-tube'.
这项设计中的另一个创新之处,是纽曼提出的"B管",
(It was so called because the arithmetic and control tubes were naturally 'A' and 'C' tubes respectively.)
这个名称是因为,算术管和控制管分别叫作"A管"(即Arithmetic,意为算术)和"C管"(即Control,意为控制)。
This additional cathode ray tube had the property of modifying the instructions held in the control;
这一新增的射线管,可以在控制过程中改变指令,
in particular it could be used when working along a sequence of numbers, in such a way that the idea of the 'next' number did not have to be rendered into laborious programming.
这在操作一组连续的数据时尤其有用,比如"下一个数"这样的想法,在程序中就可以大大简化注。
As such it was contrary to the general policy that Alan had pursued on the ACE design, that of using instructions rather than hardware as far as possible.
然而这样的设计,与图灵的想法是完全不同的,图灵认为应该尽可能地把任务交给程序,而不是硬件。