Modern computers now have a 60-year old grandfather news
21 June 2008

The first computer to be built using the fundamental plans that underpin modern personal computers celebrates its 60th anniversary.

The Small Scale Experimental Machine, well known as "Baby", ran its first program at 11 am on 21 June, 1948, at the Manchester University in the UK. It was the first "stored program computer", which ran programs by loading them into a temporary memory store, or random-access memory (RAM), exactly the way computers do today.

According to Geoff Tootill, who assisted in designing, building and testing the Baby, the approach and the fact that the the Baby was fully electronic made it easier to reprogram than computers that preceded it. Earlier computers need physical changes as part of reprogramming, he said, speaking to the UK media.

Tootill says that the idea was not to change the future of computing, ''but to demonstrate that the new storage system worked.''  Baby's RAM was made of cathode ray tubes, similar to those used in radar screens, with a single tube being capable of storing 2048 bits of digital information, the equivalent of 256 bytes.

Baby had only 1024 bits (128 bytes) of functional memory. Moreover, the only mathematical operation that Baby could perform was subtraction, though addition was possible using two subtractions. Later, Baby was enabled to perform multiplication  as well.

After a number of failed attempts, the first program Baby ran successfully, finding the highest factor of any given number. Initially it was tested on small numbers, gradually moving on the more complex calculations. The program ran on the number 218 for 52 minutes, computing 2.1 million steps. Reading the results mandated decoding of digital output shown on another cathode ray tube.

Manchester is commemorating the day with several events. Tootill remembers the original day as a seasoned engineer, recalling it as one of ''quiet satisfaction''.


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Modern computers now have a 60-year old grandfather