Baby that gave birth to a hi-tech revolution

Tag : electronic weighing machine

Weighing in at over a tonne and comprising 1,500 valves and milesof wiring, it is not what most people would recognise as acomputer.
Despite its antiquated appearance, however, this enormous machine -once nicknamed "The Baby" - was once the cutting edge oftechnology. Some of the pioneering engineers behind it gathered inManchester yesterday to celebrate the birthday of what was theworld's first digital computer.
Sixty years ago today The Baby completed its first calculation,giving birth to technologies which we are still using.
The anniversary drew some of the pioneering engineers involved inits development to the city's Museum of Science and Industry to seea replica of the machine in action. "The birth of The Baby changedthe world forever," said John Perkins, a professor at theuniversity's faculty of engineering. "We hope the celebrations willraise the profile of computer science and encourage the brightestand best of the next generation." Formally called the Small ScaleExperimental Machine, The Baby filled a laboratory at theuniversity but had less processing power than a 21st centurycalculator. In early trials the machine failed to produce a result.But on the morning of June 21 1948 Baby finally delivered: offeringthe answer to a maths problem that it had been posed a mere 52minutes earlier.
Geoff Tootill, the only surviving member of the three-man team whoconstructed the device, said he had no idea about what the futureheld when the switch was flicked. "We couldn't foresee that acomputer could be so inexpensive and so powerful.
"It's been borne on me over the years that the computer wasbecoming not only more important, but also more known to the public- this was completely foreign to us. In the 1940s we wereaccustomed to the very tight security discipline during the war."
That first program the machine processed in 1948 was intended tosolve a complex mathematical problem: determining the highestproper factor of 2 to the power of 18. And yet the machine couldnot add or multiply - only subtract. But Baby was at the edge oftechnology. Teams from around the world were racing against eachother to produce the first modern computer, with academics andengineers in the US and Germany close to building functioningmachines. Although other computers had been built when Baby cameinto operation, they were designed for a single job or requiredrewiring to perform a different calculation. Baby was the firstwhich could be reconfigured for different tasks simply by alteringprograms in its memory.
Instead of storing information on a hard drive, as we do today,Baby kept its data in a cathode ray tube - the same sort oftechnology used in TV screens.
Manchester was one of the world's leading centres of computerscience and development, and later that year Alan Turing - themathematician made famous for decoding Nazi ciphers at BletchleyPark during the second world war - joined the university to helpwork on Baby's successors. That produced the Manchester Mk 1, oneof the first commercially available computers, and the forebear ofmodern home computing.
Chris Burton, who masterminded the building of the replica, saidthat it was necessary to capture a tangible tribute to the pioneersin Manchester who brought about this revolution.
Baby's power pales in comparison to even the most common moderngadgets - an iPod can hold more than 640 million times moreinformation - and the most powerful supercomputers are light yearsahead.