Name: Manchester Baby: world's first stored program computer
Uploaded: 2017-05-19T02:52:18.000Z
Duration: 7 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

In about 1966 I asked Professor Kilburn, why is it

computer science textbook I get the American origins of computers

So Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and said

What was special about the Baby was that such a computer

can be used for a wide variety, perhaps almost an infinite variety of problems

to test out the reliability of a memory invention

computer was recognised to be the problem of storage and so the problem

Cathode ray tubes were used widely during the second world war for radar purposes

It's a way of displaying electronic signals on a screen that you can see

was excited by the electrons  and became charged

and each area of stored charge was made to represent a binary digit, a 1 or a 0

F.C. was a member of the telecommunication research establishment which was called TRE

At the end of the war he was offered a post at Manchester university

and he took one of his chaps, Tom Kilburn  and also asked for

other bright young men, so I was the next one

a very small number of people who  worked together very closely indeed

the CRT memory and in about a year he'd actually moved from one bit of storage

to one thousand to two thousand  bits of storage

was a memory which could show  static pictures

now what we needed to check was that those pictures could actually

change, be recorded properly, and do that at electronic speeds.  That's really why

It had no air conditioning so we always had windows open and things

This was the centre of Manchester and in with the fresh air came the dirt

a long coat down to your mid-thighs or knees

We avoided electric shocks by the classic artifice

of keeping one hand in your pocket all the time and never to touch anything with

We had a couple of technical staff who did did the actual building

was Ida Fitzgerald I think was her surname

She delivered the chassis wired to our diagram

and we would look at it and say oh dear, I didn't mean to do that and we would

Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill had been struggling for some days

The machine kept failing, perhaps it was a wiring error or some soldered joint had failed

and then one day it all held together and worked not just once but twice but

Finally when we pressed the start button it

We went out to lunch in the canteen as usual, and we were actually having lunch

instead of having brought in sandwiches, that  was the way we celebrated

What was needed now was to develop both the programming side

and the arithmetic side to develop  this universal machine

The Baby was then expanded over the next 18 months to create

the Manchester University Mark 1 computer.  It was made about

three times bigger, it had a lot  more store and so on

By then, as far as the engineers were concerned,  the Baby computer was old hat

In fact the racks that the Baby and the expanded Baby were built on were used

I realised that in four years time it would be the 50th anniversary

of the Baby computer.  I put together a proposal as to how we could build a

Tom Kilburn and I both vetted it  and approved it and

as we said to each other when we saw it, oh this is all wrong

We completed the replica build  and re-enacted

They operated the switches, the program ran,  they stood back, watched it on

the display tube, saw the answer was correct and then turned away and grinned

at the audience, as if to say  there we can do it again

Normally the people who did  the original work

In England it's scientists and theoreticians who tend to get the glory

It's good that we remember the contribution of the electronic

engineers to the information age, to the second industrial revolution if you like

Manchester University now has a Tom Kilburn building

which in fact contains two laboratories  known as the Tootill laboratories

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Manchester Baby: world's first stored program computer

struggle

tend

enthusiasm

expect