雙語暢銷書《艾倫圖靈傳》第8章:水銀延時線(16)
Logical as this was, and certainly comprehensible to mathematicians, who had been familiar with binary numbers for three hundred years at least, the fact was that 'fussy little details' such as this were more of a headache for other people.
To an engineer, in particular, it would come as a revelation that the concept of number could be separated from its representation in decimal form.
但是那些所謂的工程細節，對其他人來說卻是一種折磨，尤其是對工程師來說，二進制與十進制完全不是一回事，他們很難接受這一點。Many people would see the 'binary' arithmetic of the ACE as itself a weird and wonderful innovation.
有許多人認爲，ACE的二進制本身就是一項奇怪又奇妙的創舉。
Whilst he was perfectly correct in seeing this as a detail, it was a good example of his difficulties in communication with the kind of people who might fund, organise, and build his machine.
但圖靈卻把這件事說成一個"小細節"，可見他是多麼不懂得在別人面前展示自己，哪怕是將要資助、組織、製造他的機器的人。But with such details disposed of, he concentrated his report upon the two really important things: the memory and the control.
講完這些細節之後，他的報告集中於兩個確實非常重要的問題：存儲和控制。Considering the storage problem, he listed every form of discrete store that he and Don Bayley had thought of,
在存儲方面，他列舉了他跟唐·貝利研究過的每一種離散存儲機制，including film, plugboards, wheels, relays, paper tape, punched cards, magnetic tape, and 'cerebral cortex', each with an estimate,
包括膠片、插線板、轉盤、繼電器、紙帶、打孔卡片、磁帶，甚至還有大腦皮層，並且分別進行了評估。in some cases obviously fanciful, of access time, and of the number of digits that could be stored per pound sterling.
有一些明顯是不靠譜的，要麼太慢，要麼太貴。At one extreme, the storage could all be on electronic valves, giving access within a microsecond, but this would be prohibitively expensive.
比如說，把所有的數據都存在電子管中，讀取時間不超過一毫秒，但其成本卻極其高昂。
