I have previously been looking at the origins of the Ferranti machines, which started with an early liaison with Manchester University in the October of 1948.
But post-war Britain was a hot-bed of technical developments, boosted no doubt by the advances in computing, codebreaking, communications and RADAR, made during WW2.
Both Manchester and Cambridge Universities were actively building experimental machines having both sent delegates to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering summer-school conference of 1946.
Manchester opted for an electrostatic storage technique using modified CRTs, whilst Cambridge were using mercury filled acoustic delay lines. Magnetic drums and tape were a later development for bulk storage.
In the same way that Manchester developed a commercial relationship with Ferranti, Cambridge who were developing the EDSAC, had a similar arrangement with J. Lyons and Co, and the LEO was highly influenced by the EDSAC design.
The Pilot ACE, built at the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) was a cut down version of Turing’s ACE.
It was taken up by English Electric, who commercialised it as the DEUCE.
Other British companies active at this time were Elliott Brothers of Borehamwood, who released their Elliott 152 in 1950, a 20-bit machine that used Williams Tubes for storage and was strongly influenced by the Manchester line of machines.
These four company evolutionary threads continued to supply computers throughout the 1950s and into the transistor era of the 1960s.
One notable exception was the Harwell WITCH, which used Dekatron tubes for decimal counting and volatile storage. It was a one-off built for the computational requirements of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.
Finally, a survey by the US Navy of all digital computers available in 1953. Interesting to see such a variety of technology, wordlengths, speed and valve/relay/diode counts.