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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."
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.
In one sense it wasn't missed. Machines like EDSAC and LEO followed shortly afterwards but the US had a booming economy by comparison and it was a lot easier for US businesses (with the much larger internal market as well) to grow big on the back of that.
The Z3 and Z4 are great accomplishments, and Konrad Zuse is poorly remembered, but that's nothing to do with the Baby being the first machine to run an internally stored program. It was one of the first Von Neumann architecture machines, which is why it's significant.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
In retrospect it turns out that the work on the Colossus wasn't really lost; the guys who had built the Colossus still retained the knowledge, even if they couldn't tell others about it directly, but they cross-pollinated places like Manchester and Cambridge with early knowledge and ideas. That in turn gave us machines such as the LEO, was was really a phenomenally successful line of machines and broke new ground in establishing computers are useful machines for "trivial" tasks, rather than something only a scientist would ever need.
Computing in the UK really had a head start on the US in many ways, but in usual form it was underfunded and lacked vision; in many ways it suffered from the 50's post-war glow that "Britain Will Always Be Great". Once the Americans got in on the act they of course wiped the floor with everyone, and then socialist government meddling in the 60's just about finished off any hope of the UK compan[y|ies] being able to fight back.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The UK had a thriving computer industry even into the '80s. Companies like Sinclair did well in the home computer market and Acorn was selling desktops that ran a multitasking GUI very cheaply, with a lot of success in the home and schools markets. The decline started as the IBM PC gained prominence. The UK tech companies found it hard to export to the US, and didn't have as large a domestic market. Selling to mainland Europe required translations, so US companies were able to ramp up economies of scale that left them unable to compete. The ones that were successful, such as ARM (an Acorn spin-off) and Symbian (a Psion spin-off), did so by selling through existing large companies that had an established supply chain.
One of the big problems with getting large multinational companies in the UK is that it's much harder for tech companies to do well on the LSE. A startup in the US wants to get to be worth about a few hundred million and then IPO and continue to grow. A startup in the UK wants to get to be worth a few hundred million and then sell out to a big company. There are a lot of startups in the UK that make it to a few million market cap mark, but almost none that make it past the billion. A lot of this is due to different investor culture, rather than anything related to the people running the companies.
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it lays to rest the myth that Americans invented the computer
It does, but it's been many years since the "ENIAC was the first electronic computer" myth was prevalent anyway.
The post is right that Baby was tremendously important for being the first computer with an electronically stored program. However if you want to debate who invented the modern computer, it's absurd to say that any one person or group did so. Histories are right to trace it back at least as far as Babbage. In the 1930's and 1940's there were numerous people and groups in the UK, US and even Germany (Zuse) that all made important contributions.
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.