Dogsbody c. 1930, referring to people who were stuck with rough work. The term dogsbody has not always been derogatory, with a number of people deliberately using it as their callsign or handle. The most famous of these is probably Douglas Bader, who was an RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War. Dogsbody A dogsbody, or less commonly dog robber in the Royal Navy, is a junior officer, or more generally someone who does drudge work. A rough American equivalent would be a "gofer," "grunt" or "lackey". The Royal Navy used dried peas and eggs boiled in a bag (pease
Pilot ACE several years. One reason the ACE was useful is that it was able to perform floating-point arithmetic necessary for scientific calculations. Wilkinson tells the story of how this came to be. The Pilot ACE was built without hardware for multiplication or long division, in contrast to other computers at that time. The ACE started out using fixed-point multiplication and division implemented as software. It soon became apparent that fixed point arithmetic was a bad idea because the numbers quickly went out of range. It only took a short time to write new software so that the ACE could do floating-point