Back آلة مانشستر التجريبية صغيرة النطاق Arabic Манчестърска дребномащабна експериментална машина Bulgarian SSEM Catalan Small-Scale Experimental Machine German SSEM Spanish منچستر بیبی Persian Small-Scale Experimental Machine Finnish Small-Scale Experimental Machine French Manchester Baby Galician המכונה הניסיונית קטנת המידות של מנצ'סטר HE

Manchester Baby

Manchester Baby
A series of seven tall metal racks filled with electronic equipment standing in front of a brick wall. Signs above each rack describe the functions carried out by the electronics they contain. Three visitors read from information stands to the left of the image
Replica of the Baby at the Science and Industry Museum in Castlefield, Manchester
Also known asSmall-Scale Experimental Machine
DeveloperFrederic Calland Williams
Tom Kilburn
Geoff Tootill
Product familyManchester computers
Release date21 June 1948 (1948-06-21)
Memory1 kilobit (1,024 bits)
SuccessorManchester Mark 1

The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM),[1] was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its first program on 21 June 1948.[2]

The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Described as "small and primitive" 50 years after its creation, it was the first working machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic digital computer.[3] As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a full-scale operational machine, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.[4][5]

The Baby had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words (1 kilobit, 1,024 bits). As it was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer, the only arithmetic operations implemented in hardware were subtraction and negation; other arithmetic operations were implemented in software. The first of three programs written for the machine calculated the highest proper divisor of 218 (262,144), by testing every integer from 218 downwards. This algorithm would take a long time to execute—and so prove the computer's reliability, as division was implemented by repeated subtraction of the divisor. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for about 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the Baby had performed about 3.5 million operations (for an effective CPU speed of about 1100 instructions per second).[2]

  1. ^ Burton, Christopher P. (2005). "Replicating the Manchester Baby: Motives, methods, and messages from the past". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 27 (3): 44–60. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2005.42. S2CID 1852170.
  2. ^ a b Enticknap, Nicholas (Summer 1998), "Computing's Golden Jubilee", Resurrection (20), The Computer Conservation Society, ISSN 0958-7403, archived from the original on 9 January 2012, retrieved 19 April 2008
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference EarlyComputers was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Napper, R. B. E., Introduction to the Mark 1, The University of Manchester, archived from the original on 26 October 2008, retrieved 4 November 2008
  5. ^ Briggs, Helen (21 June 2018). "The 'Baby' that ushered in modern computer age". BBC. Retrieved 21 June 2018.

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