Johnny Ace Auditorium in Houston, Texas, on Christmas Day 1954. During a break between sets, he was playing with a .32-caliber revolver. Members of his band said he did this often, sometimes shooting at roadside signs from their car. It was widely reported that Ace killed himself playing Russian roulette. However, Big Mama Thornton's bass player, Curtis Tillman, who witnessed the event, said, "I will tell you exactly what happened! Johnny Ace had been drinking and he had this little pistol he was waving around the table and someone said ‘Be careful with that thing…’ and he said ‘It’s okay! Gun’s not
Pilot ACE arithmetic. After that, James H. Wilkinson became an expert and wrote a book on rounding errors in floating-point calculations, which eventually sold well. Pilot ACE used approximately 800 vacuum tubes. Its main memory consisted of mercury delay lines with an original capacity of 128 32-bit words, which was later expanded to 352 words. A 4096-word drum memory was added in 1954. Its basic clock rate, 1 megahertz, was the fastest of the early British computers. The time to execute instructions was highly dependent on where they were in memory (due to the use of delay line memory). An addition could