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65 Years Ago, Manchester's 'Baby' Ran Electronically Stored Program
hypnosec writes that the first ever practical implementation of the stored program concept took place 65 years ago, "as the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine aka 'Baby' became the world's first computer to run an electronically stored program on June 21, 1948. The 'Baby' was developed by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill at the University of Manchester. 'Baby' served as a testbed for the experimental Williams-Kilburn tube – a cathode ray tube that was used to store binary digits, aka bits. The reason this became a milestone in computing history was that up until 'Baby' ran the first electronically stored program, there was no means of storing and accessing this information in a cost-effective and flexible way."
How is this relevant to geeks and nerds?
Nobody programs baby in the corner!
It goes to show that early adopters are not always capitalized upon, perhaps it is understandable when you consider the UK at the end of WW2 had more pressing issues such as cities to rebuild, population to feed (food shortages were worse after the war than during..).
Wow. It's easy to forget that the entire industry of programmable computers is younger than a lot of ordinary people walking around today. It makes me wonder what entirely new industry I might see develop from nothing over my lifetime.
...this machine isn't even mentioned in the Wikipedia computer entry, then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
According to the wiki, the Germans were first with a calculator, followed by the Americans. The Brits are given a sentence, saying that they built the Colossus, which had 'limited programmability', but that the US machine ENIAC was really the first proper computer....
That would've been enough to store *both* "What hath God wrought?" and "Come here Watson - I want to see you."
or if you like, Jack the Knife...
Baby, Baby, Baby, Ooh! Baby, Baby, Shiny Lights! Stores few kilobytes!
Are you referring to those ladies with comptometers? Come on, it's 1950's, everyone knows that this contraption is called an "electronic brain". Computers are so a thing of the past.
Ezekiel 23:20
... when geeks were bold
and punch-cards weren't invented
we drank our joe
by the warm tube glow
and went on quite contented.
Is it just me, or does it seem with each passing year, the earliest date in which something is claimed to have happened for the first time gets pushed back a year? Just about this time last year, it seems that it was 64 years ago that the first electronically stored program was run by a computer, and now they're claiming it was 65. Way to revise history, guys. Next you'll be claiming that everyone is a year older now than they were before. Where will it end?
As all geeks know, space exploration gave us all technology. Before 1957, people were stupid. But as soon as a test pilot went into a tin can in the upper atmosphere, he came back with the knowledge of the gods. I am very suspicious of stories that challenge that. Obviously we had no technology before we went into space.
In the midst of a history of a similar project at Princeton by George Dyson. Despite the name of the book, Dyson's hero is Johnny von Neuman.
When I first started in this industry, I worked with Chris Burton who'd worked on Baby (and later led the team which rebuilt it); he had known Turing, as had another man I worked with later. Our team was led by Charlie Portman, who gets a credit in The Mythical Man Month. It's pretty amazing how close we are - two generations away - from the legendary figures who founded our industry, who built the first computers.
Chris was famous in our team because we had some new Mannesman Tally inkjet printers, which could only print ASCII, and we needed them to print bitmaps. The processor in the printers was one that no-one in the team had any experience of. So Chris took the datasheet for the printer, the datasheet for the processor, a dump of the printer ROM, and a square ruled pad home with him on the train, and came back in the morning on the train with code for a new ROM for the printer, written not in assembler but in the actual opcodes (hexadecimal), in pencil on the pad. We blew them into the ROM and it worked first time printing perfect bitmaps, no errors, no bugs to fix.
That's how good the first generation programmers were. I am still in awe of that. And he was a very modest man, very generous with his experience. I'm proud to have learned from him.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
A billion years ago, when I was studying for my Computer Science degree at Manchester University, the design of the Mark 1 and its test machine was certainly on the curriculum. I remember an exam where I had to describe the evolution of ALUs from Mark I to Cray I. Kids these days just get a bunch of Java and Hadoop.
I don't where 'Baby' came from, I never heard it referred to as that by the staff who worked on it. I graduated in 1990. I don't think I heard it referred to as 'Baby' until I was living in the 'States post 2000.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Using a CRT to scan data onto high persistence phosphor, and then use optical sensors to feed that data back to the electron gun created the first dynamic storage system. This machine not only was the first machine with electronic storage, but was the first machine to exercise an example of Dynamic Random Access Memory.