Manchester Baby

The Manchester Baby was an experimental British electronic computer that ran the first program stored in electronic memory on 21 June 1948. Its successful test demonstrated that a computer could store instructions and data together.

Williams tube: A cathode-ray-tube device that stores binary data as electrical charges on its screen. This electrostatic memory held the Baby’s program and data.
University of Manchester: A public research university in Manchester, England, founded in its modern form in 2004. Its computing group built and tested the Baby at the university.
Stored-program computer: A computer that keeps program instructions in memory alongside data, allowing programs to be changed without rewiring. The Baby demonstrated this architecture using electronic memory.
21 June 1948: The date on which the Manchester Baby first successfully ran a stored program. The machine completed its landmark test on this date.
Instruction set: The collection of operations a processor can execute, encoded in instructions. The Baby’s simple instruction set defined the operations its stored program could perform.
Frederic Calland Williams: A British engineer whose work on cathode-ray-tube memory helped make the Manchester Baby possible. He led the Manchester team developing the memory and machine.
Manchester Mark 1: A larger early electronic computer developed at the University of Manchester after the Manchester Baby. The Baby’s successful test led to a more capable machine for practical computing.
Manchester Baby replica: A working reconstruction of the Manchester Baby built at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The replica demonstrates the prototype’s physical design and operation.
Manchester Baby instruction set: The set of machine instructions implemented by the Manchester Baby. Its 32-bit instructions specified operations, memory addresses, and control flow.
Tom Kilburn: A British computer scientist who helped build the Manchester Baby and wrote its first program. He collaborated with Williams on the prototype’s design and construction.

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