Davies, Donald Watts.

Born in Treorchy in the Rhodda Valley on 7 July 1924. In July 1925 his father died and Davies moved with his mother and twin sister to Portsmouth to live with his maternal grandmother and aunt. In 1941, on the completion of his school education at the Portsmouth Boys Southern Secondary School, he took up a 'Royal' Scholarship at Imperial College London where he studied physics. In 1943 he graduated with first-class honours and was directed to work at Birmingham University as a research assistant in the Tube Alloys Project (the British contribution to the development of nuclear weapons) under R.E. Peierls and later A.H. Wilson. Davies's main work was concerned with the stability and control problems for the gaseous diffusion plant. In 1944 he continued to work for the Tube Alloys Project at ICI, Billingham, on Teeside and in 1945 at the close of the project he returned to Birmingham to work in the Physics Department under M.L.E. Oliphant. The overlap between the courses at Imperial College allowed Davies to complete the requirements for a mathematics degree in a year and he resumed the scholarship for that purpose, graduating with first class honours in 1947.

The National Physics Laboratory was setting up a group to build a stored program computer under the direction of A.M. Turing and Davies joined this group and began working on the logic design and later the building of the ACE Computer. When the Pilot ACE was built, Davies became a user, working on a variety of simulations, including the behaviour of road junctions controlled by traffic lights. In 1954 Davies was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to study in the USA. He came to view his choice of MIT as an error because all the interesting computer work was classified. The period at MIT was interrupted by a special mission for the United Nations, investigating a request from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta for funds to buy equipment from the USSR. Subsequently he was involved for a number of years on two new projects. One was the development of the cryotron, a superconducting device with potential for the large-scale integration of logic and storage. However, efforts in this area foundered on engineering problems of many kinds. The other was the translation by computer from Russia to English. Davies concluded that although 'we were not able to set up a serviced based on this work 'it is noteworthy that our real experience' was very different from the accepted public view of machine translation.

...