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.)
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.