
The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer - happy-go-lucky
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44554891
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PaulRobinson
Manchester alumni here. It's made me feel a tad old that I was an
undergraduate when the 50th anniversary celebrations were happening.

At the time this was being built, Alan Turing was working on the ACE at the
National Physical Laboratory. The moment he heard the "Baby" was functional he
dropped it like a hot brick and moved to Manchester, where he remained until
his suicide in 1954.

It was whilst working with the Mark I/Baby that he started thinking about
artificial intelligence, and devised what we now refer to as the Turing Test.

The original machine was built using parts that were in plentiful supply post-
war. That meant when they need to build a reconstruction for it in the 1990s,
they has to source switches that were also scoured for by people restoring
Spitfire planes.

The reconstructed machine lives at the Museum of Science and Industry and when
I saw it last, the process of bootstrapping it to a known good state involved
having state loaded in from an Amstrad PC1512.

The memory particularly surprised me when I first saw it, because it was
constructed with a CRT and a piece of mesh in front of it, with the CRT
displaying an array of dots for the 1s, and this activating the point in the
grid of the mesh which would be used as a read and also to refresh it.

I keep meaning to dig around and find some examples of early programs that
were stored on there. I know Turing was at one point fascinated with the
development of markings on animal fur and skin and vaguely recall he may have
done some work around that on the Mark I. I definitely know he was interested
in AI at this time too.

An interesting - and much under-reported and under-values - milestone in our
profession's history, this machine. It's a real shame that having made great
leaps in the first years of the computing industry Britain fell behind so
quickly.

~~~
oakesm9
Also Manchester Alumni.

Here's the Manchester Science & Industry page about the Baby:

[https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/objects-and-stories/baby-
an...](https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/objects-and-stories/baby-and-modern-
computing)

They do demonstrations of the Baby running 4 days a week apparently:

[https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/whats-on/meet-
baby](https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/whats-on/meet-baby)

~~~
pertymcpert
Matt?

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anananao
Actually not true. See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_\(computer\))

Sadly it is part of a general trend in the english speaking world to overstate
the scientific and technical achievements of one's countrymen

~~~
montrose
I notice that although Zuse's patent applications are mentioned in the
Wikipedia article on stored-program computers, the Z3 is not included in the
list of candidates for first working hardware. Can anyone explain to me why it
would have been disqualified?

~~~
longwave
A stored-program computer requires the program itself to be stored in
electronic memory, the Z3 uses electronic memory for input and output but tape
for the program.

~~~
ahartmetz
How the program is stored seems pretty irrelevant, really... Sure there's a
category "stored-program computer", but why was it created?

IMO Zuse's machines were the big deal, but they were buried under a number of
other firsts that weren't that revolutionary, after the war when the Allies
were writing history alone for a few years.

~~~
timrichard
> after the war when the Allies were writing history alone for a few years.

British machinery like Colossus was still kept a closely guarded secret until
the mid 1970s.

~~~
jdietrich
The machinery was secret, but the lessons learned quietly trickled out.
Newman, Flowers and Turing couldn't talk about what they did at Bletchley, but
they made substantial contributions to the development of computers in the
post-war years.

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m-i-l
Interesting to see Ferranti mentioned a couple of times: "the Ferranti Mark 1,
the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer" and "Tim
Berners-Lee was the son of an engineer who worked at Ferranti". Ferranti were
a pioneer in early computing, a huge employer in the part of Scotland in which
I grew up, and were very respected and successful for a long time.
Unfortunately they came to a very tragic end after expanding into the US,
buying a company called International Signal and Control, which turned out to
be a front for the US government's illegal sales of arms to right wing
dictatorships, with entirely fabricated accounts (i.e. non-existent profits),
and they went bankrupt as a result[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti)

~~~
avian
Perhaps the most well known product of Ferranti for a somewhat younger
generation of computer enthusiasts is the infamous "ULA" chip in the Sinclair
ZX Spectrum.

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trevyn
> _When we start going inter-galactic which will happen in 70 years_

Teehee.

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_Codemonkeyism
Ah again another article from publication in nation A with "Computer from
nation A is the first X". Replace A with US, Italy, UK, Germany, ... and X
with "computer", "electronic computer", "stored-program computer", "commercial
computer".

I know why publications do this so their readers feel good, but I always hope
HN could get above nationalism when it comes to computer history.

~~~
walshemj
There are only three countries that can lay any claim (UK USA and Germany and
its pretty well accepted that Baby was the first stored program computer.

