[3] Built at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the early 1950s, it was also one of the earliest general-purpose, stored-program computers – joining other UK designs like the Manchester Mark 1 and EDSAC of the same era.

It was a preliminary version of the full ACE, which was designed by Alan Turing, who left NPL before the construction was completed.

After Turing left NPL (in part because he was disillusioned by the lack of progress on building the ACE), James H. Wilkinson took over the project.

[8][9] Although originally intended as a prototype, it became clear that the machine was a potentially useful resource, especially given the lack of other computing devices at the time.

After that, James Wilkinson became an expert and wrote a book on rounding errors in floating-point calculations, which eventually sold well.

The machine was so successful that a commercial version of it, named the DEUCE, was constructed and sold by the English Electric Company.

Following urging by J. M. Hahn[13][14] of the British Aircraft Corporation,[15] Brian W. Munday developed General Interpretive Programme (GIP), which required only simple codewords to run a collection of programs called "bricks".

Bricks to be used with GIP were written by M. Woodger, who devised a unique scheme for storing array elements, namely, "block floating".