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.
The story I heard from my office-mate at the time, who was involved in the rebuild, was about the valves being used in Spitfires (though likely other things too); so it was only a question of finding a warehouse with the stock of Spitfire parts.
The Williams-Kilburn memory was faster than the alternative mercury delay lines (or gin delay lines proposed by Turing) but more subject to interference.
It's a shame what's become specifically of Manchester computing since I've known it, though there's still SpiNNaker.
(Manchester non-alumnus, wondering why alumni post in the plural.)
I just got back from a trip to Scotland and England and I had a chance to visit Bletchley Park and The National Museum of Computing. I had a discussion about computing firsts with the man demonstrating the Colossus code breaking computer. It's basically useless to claim any machine was the "first" computer without dumping a lot of adjectives on it. The Baby (which I must see, if I ever get to Manchester) is considered the first _electronic_ digital stored program computer. The Z3 was not fully electronic. The Colossus has a claim to "first electronic digital computer", with the caveat that it wasn't general purpose. The ENIAC is usually described as the first fully electronic, general purpose, digital computer. The point is that arguing over firsts in this business is pointless. It took a village.
I'd also like to give a hearty recommendation to anyone interested in such things that they take the time to visit Bletchley. The exhibits at Bletchley Park are fascinating and the working machines next door at TNMOC are amazing. In addition to the Colossus rebuild, I was particularly taken with the Harwell Dekatron, which has enough blinking lights and chattering relays to belong on a 50s sci-fi movie set. I was disappointed that the rebuild of the EDSAC wasn't ready, but maybe I'll get back there some day. I also hope to see the reconstructed Zuse machines if I get back to Germany.
I’m from Bletchley (and actually lived in a housing development built on some of the land that the trust that owned the park sold, inventively named Bletchley Park)!
Historically (as in,5/6 years ago), Bletchley Park was in dire need of major upkeep work and stimulus to keep it open. It’s only been since the Turing film came out that the Park received a ton of funding and managed to pull itself into the modern era as a museum and afford all of the expensive work that needed to be done to restore the machines.
I remember walking around there as a kid with my dad (perhaps 15 years ago or so) and there was considerably less content and working machinery. I only remember seeing an enigma machine - the emphasis was much more around life during WW2 and general military technology. Nowadays the focus is on signal intelligence and code breaking, and is honestly much more interesting. We always go there once every year or so to check it out and see new exhibits, but still haven’t visited the now separate computing museum on the main site.
Can’t recommend visiting Bletchley Park highly enough if you’re in the UK, only a 30 to 45 minute train journey out of London, and the park is literally opposite Bletchley train station.
If you do visit, don’t be under the impression that the town of Bletchley that houses the park is equally as beautiful - it’s not. Don’t visit the town. You will be very, very disappointed if you’re a foreign tourist on a day trip.
> Sadly it is part of a general trend in the english speaking world to overstate the scientific and technical achievements of one's countrymen
It's a trend in every nation but the english speaking world dominates the media landscape. So you'll see a more skewed outlook. It shouldn't be shocking that the BBC has a skewed view on such topics.
For example, I was taught that newton invented calculus, but we know that calculus had contributions from many people including people like leibniz.
It goes beyond nations as well. For example, europeans claim they discovered americas when natives beat them by 10000 years. Europeans celebrate the gutenburg press when the chinese and koreans had it hundreds of years before. We are taught that greeks gave us civilization when in actuality, greeks borrowed their civilization from many many places.
Nationalism, regionalism, etc isn't just an english-speaking world phenomenon. It's a human condition. I'm sure if you look at other nations or cultures, you'll see that they also view themselves as exceptional and take an unreasonable amount of credit for things they did or did not invent.
> Europeans celebrate the gutenburg press when the chinese and koreans had it hundreds of years before.
Actually, Gutenberg did build the first printing press. The Chinese developed both printing and movable type much earlier, but they did not go on to develop a full press for printing.
This is one of the issues: there is a lot of cultural value in being able to make the "first" claim stick, but it is often very difficult to define what constitutes "first." Stephenson's Rocket was not the first locomotive, but it was clearly so superior to every other extant model that every subsequent locomotive relied heavily on its innovation. The B&O Railroad is one of the strongest contenders for "first railroad in the US" title, yet the early railroad is nothing like the modern one, particularly in track construction.
> Actually, Gutenberg did build the first printing press. The Chinese developed both printing and movable type much earlier, but they did not go on to develop a full press for printing.
The chinese developed printing and movable type but not a "full press"? Not sure if I follow. I'd say the chinese/koreans invented the movable type ( metal type ) and the printing press but latin/alphabet languages/writings were better suited to being exploited to movable type/printing press than the chinese writing system? A movable type printing press based on 26 letter is far better than one based on thousands of characters. But it's still the printing press.
> This is one of the issues: there is a lot of cultural value in being able to make the "first" claim stick, but it is often very difficult to define what constitutes "first."
Absolutely. You could argue those who popularized an invention is even more important than those who invented it. Steve Jobs didn't invent the PC, he didn't invent smartphones, he didn't invent tablets, etc, but you could argue he is more important those who invented it because he popularized it.
From what I understand they didn't use presses, but made prints manually, the same way traditional woodblock prints are made: ink the surface, put paper on top and rub it/press it down with a hand-held tool of some kind, instead of using a mechanical contraption to apply pressure.
They were advanced printmakers, but for some reason the printing press never happened.
> The chinese developed printing and movable type but not a "full press"? Not sure if I follow. I'd say the chinese/koreans invented the movable type ( metal type ) and the printing press but latin/alphabet languages/writings were better suited to being exploited to movable type/printing press than the chinese writing system? A movable type printing press based on 26 letter is far better than one based on thousands of characters. But it's still the printing press.
There's a lot to unpack here.
Printing, specifically, is a means of transferring ink to paper (or parchment, but paper tends to work better for printing for mechanical reasons). There are several different variations on the idea, but the original genesis of the idea and much of the early variation does originate in China.
The basics of printing boil down to: you have a raised platform that contains the thing being printed, you cover that with ink, you place the paper on top of it, and then you apply pressure to transfer ink to paper. For the Asian woodblock printing, I believe pressure was mostly applied via rubbing.
Movable type was an innovation that allowed you to build the block that was used for printing out of reusable components, which dramatically cuts down on the time it takes to prepare the blocks. East Asian languages are well-suited for movable type because their language is already written in a highly grid-based system; by contrast, the Latin alphabet has characters that bleed into other's boxes all over the place (kerning is a thing in Latin, not in Chinese). Extending printing to the Latin alphabet came with a lot more typographic changes than you'd think.
Gutenberg made, or at least synthesized for the first time in one piece, several innovations [1] in his press: the reuse of press technology to apply force evenly and quickly to paper; the development of a lead alloy for type that was long-lasting and could withstand the forces with less wear; the development of more uniform molds for the type; the development of better inks for pressing against the paper.
It's certainly true that the innovations of printing and movable type are Chinese. But those innovations, while necessary, were not sufficient to facilitate the massive spread of printing to make books cheap and ubiquitous. Extra innovations that Europeans did (in typecasting and the press itself, most notably) were also necessary.
[1] It's debated how many of these were actually done by Gutenberg himself versus how many were developed by other contemporary European shops and reused by Gutenberg. In either case, everything I'm listing was innovated in Europe, not in China.
I made a tiny app to solve this kind of disagreement; I was annoyed by the unjust dominance of the ENIAC over Hoelzer's 50 Jahre Computer and the Z3, but also over the Manchester Baby, which really was a massive step forward.
There are about 2304 "first" computers, by my model.
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?
Architecturally, the Z3 and the Manchester Baby are very different. The Z3 is essentially a programmable calculator, lacking random-access memory or conditional branching. It's just barely Turing complete, but this was only discovered in 1998 after a very clever analysis by Raúl Rojas.
The Manchester Baby is small, slow and primitive, but it's also fundamentally modern, implementing a proper von Neumann architecture. It had a much more primitive arithmetic unit than the Z3 (capable only of subtraction and negation), but it had an instruction set that would be familiar to a modern programmer.
Zuse didn't know that he had built a Turing-complete computer. He was a practical man and built a practical machine for performing useful calculations. The Manchester Baby was explicitly built as a general-purpose computer. It was in many ways less useful than than the Z3, but it was a far more significant advance. Although Kilburn, Williams and Tootill knew nothing of the work that had been done at Bletchley Park, they were guided by people who did.
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.
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.
I agree that Zuse deserves to be much better known, though I think he is actually better known than this machine, and the people who created it.
While I agree that, conceptually, there is little difference between a program on tape and one in working memory, the latter has a huge speed advantage. More intriguingly, I believe it was thought at the time that the ability of a program to modify itself would be very useful. Turing had already shown that it did not expand what is computable (though I do not know if that was widely appreciated), but even so, when you have very little, and slow, working memory, if it allowed you to reduce the size or speed of your program, that might be a big deal. Even the early COBOL allowed for limited self-modification, in the form of a goto that could be modified during execution to go to different addresses. The problem with self-modifying code turned out to be that it is very hard to reason about and debug.
As the Z3 cannot perform conditional branches I assume it was difficult or impossible for the hardware at the time to do anything other than move the tape in a linear sequence in a single clock cycle. A stored-program computer that uses a program counter to point to the current instruction (the position on the "tape") seems to be a significant step forward.
Right. If I recall correctly a proof it was potentially Turing complete is relatively recent and obscure, so it's difficult to consider it a general purpose computer like the SSEM. Credit to Zuse, like the pre-war Polish cryptographers, anyhow.
"We can therefore say that, from an abstract theoretical perspective, the computing model of the Z3 is equivalent to the computing model of today's computers. From a practical perspective, and in the way the Z3 was really programmed, it was not equivalent to modern computers."
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.
And thus also the contribution of people like Kilburn, featured rather sadly in a BBC documentary and particularly relevant here, with many in a similar boat.
The Baby was the first stored-program computer, i.e. the first computer to store the program instructions in electronic memory, as opposed to a physical medium like the Z3's punched film. It even says so in the article you linked.
The distinction is vanishingly small. Every new memory technology (paper tape, punch card, drum, core, rom, prom, eeprom, magnetic disk, NFS, NOR flash, NAND flash, stone tablets, etc, etc) would then generate a "first computer to store on X". X is just a storage technology. Heck - computers from the 70 still stored programs on paper punch card and only loaded a few opcodes into RAM. If you are aware of what cache hiearchy is, then this distinction becomes even fainter - the Z3 might have some instructions cached as relay state - electrical storage.
Using a unified memory allowed for self modifying code. That's not something we do now, but those early machines had extremely limited memory and every trick was needed just to get anything done.
It is not a "trick", it is one of the only possible ways to achieve Turing-completeness: code self-modification, conditional branches or extensive (exponential) computation (Zuse Z3).
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.