Technology, training, learning and development blogs

Nobody puts Baby in the corner

If you reconise the quote above, this blog isn’t a review of the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, it’s a 60th birthday greeting to what is generally acknowledged to be the world’s first electrically programmable computer – The Manchester Baby (.NET Framework MCMXLVIII not included).

It is testament to the progress that has been made in the last 60 years that the musical birthday cards received by “The Baby” each have more memory than the birthday boy, and more importantly, from the postman’s perspective anyway, don’t weigh nearly a ton.

The proud parents of The Baby were the late Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams, they built this “pivotal PC” at the University of Manchester. Quite by accident, Britain had invented the modern programmable computer. Shorty after 11am on 21st of June 1948, The Baby not so much uttered his first word as executed his first programme, and it did it so without a Blue Screen of Death in sight, in fact it did so without an operator screen at all.  There may not have been a screen but it did have around 4,000 valves, 2,500 capacitors, 15,000 resistors, 100,000 soldered joints and 6 miles of wire. Running at a blistering basic pulse repetition frequency of 100 Kc/s!

For those of the Starbucks generation, a valve is a power hungry, unreliable component that was superseded by the transistor and ultimately many millions of transistors integrated onto a silicon chip.

If you are anything like me, you have a garage full of “old” computer bits; you never know, CPM and 8 inch floppies may make a comeback. Sadly the original Baby didn’t survive in anyone’s garage, mainly because no ones garage was big enough to accommodate two bays each 16 feet long, 8 feet high, and 4 feet wide -- plus a control desk. But if you’d like to meet The Baby you’ll find a cloned twin in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester (I’ve made the pilgrimage many times whilst Mrs D. is in Primark).  If you can’t make it to Manchester, there is a Java based emulator that will give you that programming with switches experience. In those days, object orientated programme meant programming with objects, usually switches, salvaged from war surplus. Check out the emulator if you are swatting up for your BCSE (Baby Certified Systems Engineer).

Send in the clones

The cloned twin was completed in June 1998 by the BCS Computer Conservation Society, 1800 people were compelled to turn out for the launch. On the 21st June anniversary, with The Baby  formally handed over to the museum, it re-ran the original programme  - to determine the highest factor of a number, 2^18, the correct answer was found in 52 minutes, involved about 2.1 million instructions with about 3½ million store accesses.  It’s not recorded if it’s possible to overclock The Baby to improve on that 52 minutes or if SP1 improved performance.

As we sit reading this on our Ghz powered Pocket PCs it would be easy to dismiss The Baby as merely an academic play thing, consigned to the history of computing but of no lasting importance. However The Baby grew up. It was adopted by the Ferranti family who christened him Mark and put him to work. The Ferranti Company sold the computer as the Mark 1 and later as the Mark 1*. The first two machines to be made were sold to the universities of Manchester and Toronto. The Mark 1 improved on the specification of The Baby with the addition of a hard disk (well drum based storage actually) – this was a major step forward even if manual intervention was required to transfer data from the drum to RAM. (Imagine having to manually get data from C:\My Documents and stuffing it into RAM, the average swap file would induce RSI in all concerned).  The Ferranti Mark 1 is controversially considered to be the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer, with 9 eventually sold.  A quick check on eBay didn’t reveal anyone offering a slightly used Mark 1 for sale – buyer collects.

Sales and Marketing

Have a look at the 1952 Ferranti marketing brochure; for the layman they explain that computers..:

• can perform all the operations of arithmetic exceedingly rapidly
• can remember a great many numbers
• can make decisions

I guess today that would read..:

• can play games really fast, rendering 3D worlds in real time
• can store the entire back catalogue of all the music you may ever want to download
• can help you decide whether to order the Domino.com pepperoni passion or mad meat monster

Multimedia capable

One feature they don’t mention are the multimedia capabilities. The oldest recording of computer generated music comes not from Ultravox but a 1951 recording of a Ferranti Mark 1, More Barr Barr Black Sheep  than Jean Michel Jarre . 1951 was also the year the first commercial business application was released. Not for the Mark 1 but a competing product from Cambridge University, called Leo and running at 500Khz, this application was designed for business data processing. I wonder what those involved could ever have imagined where we would be today with our LCD monitors, wireless mice and USB powered fans !

Happy 60th Birthday

Despite this promising British start, the American firm IBM ultimately dominated the world of “mainframe” business computing and of course Microsoft dominate the desktop market, both organisations should raise a glass to those early pioneers, as should we all. Yep, happy birthday Baby, we owe you one...

Till next time

 

PS I was forced to watch Dirty Dancing – honest !