On December 1, 1948, a significant event in the history of science took place when the first stored-program computer, known as the "Baby," successfully executed its first program at the University of Manchester in England.
The Manchester Baby, officially named the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was a groundbreaking achievement in computer science. It was designed and built by a team led by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill. The machine was the first to store both its program instructions and data in electronic memory, a concept that became the foundation for modern computing.
The Baby was a relatively small machine, weighing around a ton and consisting of about 550 vacuum tubes, a cathode-ray tube memory, and a magnetic drum for storage. Despite its size, it could store up to 32 instructions or 32 words of data in its memory.
On that historic day, the first program run on the Baby was designed to find the highest proper factor of any given number. The program, written by Tom Kilburn, consisted of just 17 instructions and took about 52 minutes to complete. When the program finished, the correct answer appeared on the computer's display, marking a significant milestone in the history of computing.
The success of the Manchester Baby paved the way for the development of more advanced computers, such as the Manchester Mark 1, which was completed in 1949. The Mark 1 was the first commercially available general-purpose computer and served as a blueprint for subsequent computer designs.
The legacy of the Manchester Baby and the team behind it continues to inspire computer scientists and innovators to this day. Their work laid the foundation for the digital revolution that has transformed our world in countless ways, from communication and entertainment to scientific research and space exploration.
This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
