At the end of WWII there was much interest in developing electronic digital computing systems.
John von Neumann wrote his seminal report which was distributed in late June 1945. It contains the first published description of the logical design of a computer using the stored-program concept, which has come to be known as the von Neumann architecture.
Interest in developments was unprecedented, reaching the engineering and mathematics departments of universities all over the industrialised world.
To focus the interest, a series of lectures was planned for the following year, when commercial travel, once again became possible following the end of the War.
A summer-school at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania took place in July and August of 1946, and was widely attended.
If that summer school was the conception of the modern digital computer, then the “Baby” arrived some 18 months later.
The Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or Manchester “Baby”, was the World’s first electronic, stored program computer. It ran it’s first program on May 2nd 1948, at Manchester University, UK.
It was never anticipated at that time that this Heath Robinson-esque cluster of vacuum tubes, cathode ray tubes, teleprinters, paper tape, relays and switches would be the birth of the UK computer industry, which would span the next 50 years, and parts of it are still in evidence today.
The Manchester “Baby”, was a proof of concept machine, to prove the viability of a novel electrostatic charge, data storage system, based on CRT technology, which was a spin-off of WW2 RADAR systems. This storage device was named the Williams-Kilburn CRT store or “Williams Tube”, named after it’s inventors Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, who had both worked at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), in Malvern, Worcestershire, during the War on top-secret RADAR developments.
With this tube, they had demonstrated that they could store up to 2048 bits of data, in the form of a matrix of electrostatic charge, on the face of a 6" diameter cathode ray tube, and use it to store a computer program, registers and the resulting data.
The “Baby” was barely a recognisable computer, with a only 8 instructions, and no bulk storage.
A full size replica of the “Baby” is exhibited, and demonstrated at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Manchester.
This would quickly be remedied, with the immediate development of it’s successor, the Manchester Mark 1.
By the Autumn of 1949 the engineering team had produced a working computer with a larger store and more powerful instruction set, but in October 1948 they had already been requested by the UK Government to allow electronic and electrical giant, Ferranti to produce a commercial machine to the same specification.
This commercial spin-off was known as the Ferranti MK 1, which would influence the Commonwealth and European mainframe computer industry for decades.
