Replica of the Baby at the Science and Industry Museum in Castlefield, Manchester
Also known as
Small-Scale Experimental Machine
Developer
Frederic Calland Williams Tom Kilburn Geoff Tootill
Product family
Manchester computers
Release date
21 June 1948; 75 years ago (1948-06-21)
Memory
1 kibibit (1,024 bits)
Successor
Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM),[1] was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.[2]
The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Described as "small and primitive" 50 years after its creation, it was the first working machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic digital computer.[3] As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a full scale operational machine, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.[4][5]
The Baby had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words (1 kibibit, 1,024 bits). As it was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer, the only arithmetic operations implemented in hardware were subtraction and negation; other arithmetic operations were implemented in software. The first of three programs written for the machine calculated the highest proper divisor of 218 (262,144), by testing every integer from 218 downwards. This algorithm would take a long time to execute—and so prove the computer's reliability, as division was implemented by repeated subtraction of the divisor. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for about 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the Baby had performed about 3.5 million operations (for an effective CPU speed of about 1100 instructions per second).[2]
^Burton, Christopher P. (2005). "Replicating the Manchester Baby: Motives, methods, and messages from the past". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 27 (3): 44–60. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2005.42. S2CID 1852170.
^ abEnticknap, Nicholas (Summer 1998), "Computing's Golden Jubilee", Resurrection (20), The Computer Conservation Society, ISSN 0958-7403, archived from the original on 9 January 2012, retrieved 19 April 2008
^Cite error: The named reference EarlyComputers was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Napper, R. B. E., Introduction to the Mark 1, The University of Manchester, archived from the original on 26 October 2008, retrieved 4 November 2008
^Briggs, Helen (21 June 2018). "The 'Baby' that ushered in modern computer age". BBC. Retrieved 21 June 2018.
The ManchesterBaby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University...
series, the ManchesterBaby, ran its first program on 21 June 1948. As the world's first stored-program computer, the Baby, and the Manchester Mark 1 developed...
mercury delay lines. From about August 1948, the Baby was intensively developed as a prototype for the Manchester Mark 1, initially with the aim of providing...
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recognizably modern electronic digital stored-program computer was the ManchesterBaby, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948. The development of transistors...
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of London) officially came online on May 12, 1948. ManchesterBaby (Victoria University of Manchester, England) made its first successful run of a stored...
Engineering Department at the University of Manchester with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn developing the ManchesterBaby, "the world's first wholly electronic...
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required rewiring to reprogram until April 1948. In June 1948, the ManchesterBaby ran its first program and earned the distinction of first electronic...
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the spinning wheel. The University of Manchester built the world's first programmable computer, the ManchesterBaby, on 21 June 1948; the Williams–Kilburn...
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transistor, in 1947. In 1953, the University of Manchester built the first transistorized computer, the ManchesterBaby. However, early junction transistors were...
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only ILLIAC and ORDVAC had compatible instruction sets. ManchesterBaby (University of Manchester, England) made its first successful run of a stored program...
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